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{during this pre-war period. As in the case of Kingston upon Hull they had taken measures to secure strategic towns and cities, by appointing men sympathetic to their cause, and on 9 June they had voted to raise an army of 10,000 volunteers, appointing Robert Devereux, 3rd Earl of Essex commander three days later. He received orders "to rescue His Majesty's person, and the persons of the Prince 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 Couincil 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.

The first pitched battle of the war, fought at Edgehill on 23 October 1642, proved inconclusive, and both the Royalists and Parliamentarians claimed it as a victory. The second field action of the war, the stand-off at Turnham Green, saw Charles forced to withdraw to Oxford. This city would serve as his base for the remainder of the war.

In 1643 the Royalist forces won at Adwalton Moor, and gained control of most of Yorkshire. In the Midlands, a Parliamentary force under Sir John Gell, 1st Baronet besieged and captured the cathedral city of Lichfield, after the death of the original commander, Lord Brooke. This group subsequently joined forces with Sir John Brereton to fight the inconclusive Battle of Hopton Heath (19 March 1643), where the Royalist commander, the Earl of Northampton, was killed. Subsequent battles in the west of England at Lansdowne and at Roundway Down also went to the Royalists. Prince Rupert could then take Bristol. In the same year, Oliver Cromwell formed his troop of "Ironsides", a disciplined unit that demonstrated his military leadership-ability. With their assistance, he won a victory at the Battle of Gainsborough in July.

In general, the early part of the war went well for the Royalists. The turning-point came in the late summer and early autumn of 1643, when the Earl of Essex's army forced the king to raise the siege of Gloucester and then brushed the Royalist army aside at the First Battle of Newbury (20 September 1643), in order to return triumphantly to London. Other Parliamentarian forces won the Battle of Winceby, giving them control of Lincoln. Political manoeuvering to gain an advantage in numbers led Charles to negotiate a ceasefire in Ireland, freeing up English troops to fight on the Royalist side in England, while Parliament offered concessions to the Scots in return for aid and assistance.

With the help of the Scots, Parliament won at Marston Moor (2 July 1644), gaining York and the north of England. Cromwell's conduct in this battle proved decisive, and demonstrated his potential as both a political and an important military leader. The defeat at the Battle of Lostwithiel in Cornwall, however, marked a serious reverse for Parliament in the south-west of England. Subsequent fighting around Newbury ( 1644), though tactically indecisive, strategically gave another check to Parliament.

In 1645 Parliament reaffirmed its determination to fight the war to a finish. It passed the Self-denying Ordinance, by which all members of either House of Parliament laid down their commands, and re-organized its main forces into the New Model Army ("Army"), under the command of Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Cromwell as his second-in-command and Lieutenant-General of Horse. In two decisive engagements — the Battles of Naseby on 14 June and of Langport on 10 July — the Parliamentarians effectively destroyed Charles' armies.

In the remains of his English realm Charles attempted to recover a stable base of support by consolidating the Midlands. He began to form an axis between Oxford and Newark on Trent in Nottinghamshire. Those towns had become fortresses and showed more reliable loyalty to him than to others. He took Leicester, which lies between them, but found his resources exhausted. Having little opportunity to replenish them, in May 1646 he sought shelter with a Scottish army at Southwell in Nottinghamshire. This marked the end of the First English Civil War.

The Second English Civil War

Charles I took advantage of the deflection of attention away from himself to negotiate a new agreement with the Scots, again promising church reform, on 28 December 1647. Although Charles himself remained a prisoner, this agreement led inexorably to the Second Civil War.

A series of Royalist uprisings throughout England and a Scottish invasion occurred in the summer of 1648. Forces loyal to Parliament put down most of the uprisings in England after little more than skirmishes, but uprisings (in Kent, Essex and Cumberland), the rebellion in Wales and the Scottish invasion involved the fighting of pitched battles and prolonged sieges.

In the spring of 1648 unpaid Parliamentarian troops in Wales changed sides. Colonel Thomas Horton defeated the Royalist rebels at the Battle of St. Fagans (8 May) and the rebel leaders surrendered to Cromwell on 11 July after the protracted two-month siege of Pembroke. Sir Thomas Fairfax defeated a Royalist uprising in Kent at the Battle of Maidstone on 24 June. Fairfax, after his success at Maidstone and the pacification of Kent, turned northward to reduce Essex, where, under their ardent, experienced and popular leader Sir Charles Lucas, the Royalists had taken up arms in great numbers. Fairfax soon drove the enemy into Colchester, but his first attack on the town met with a repulse and he had to settle down to a long siege.

In the North of England, Major-General John Lambert fought a very successful campaign against a number of Royalist uprisings — the largest that of Sir Marmaduke Langdale in Cumberland. Thanks to Lambert's successes, the Scottish commander, the Duke of Hamilton, had perforce to take the western route through Carlisle in his pro-Royalist Scottish invasion of England. The Parliamentarians under Cromwell engaged the Scots at the Battle of Preston (17 August – 19 August). The battle took place largely at Walton-le-Dale near Preston in Lancashire, and resulted in a victory by the troops of Cromwell over the Royalists and Scots commanded by Hamilton. This Parliamentarian victory marked the end of the Second English Civil War.

Nearly all the Royalists who had fought in the First Civil War had given their parole not to bear arms against the Parliament, and many honourable Royalists, like Lord Astley, refused to break their word by taking any part in the second war. So the victors in the Second Civil War showed little mercy to those who had brought war into the land again. On the evening of the surrender of Colchester, Parlementarians had Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle shot. Parlianentary 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 a high court of justice in order to try Charles I for treason in the name of the people of England.

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 did not agree with the execution of Charles I and who feared for the future of Presbyterianism and Scottish independence under the new Commonwealth) offered him the crown of Scotland, Charles abandoned Montrose to his enemies. However, Montrose, who had raised a mercenary force in Norway, had already landed and could not abandon the fight. He did not succeed in raising many Highland clans and the Covenanters defeated his army at the Battle of Carbisdale in Ross-shire on 27 April 1650. The victors captured Montrose shortly afterwards and took him to Edinburgh. On 20 May the Scottish Parliament sentenced him to death and had him hanged the next day.

Charles II landed in Scotland at Garmouth in Morayshire on 23 June 1650 and signed the 1638 National Covenant and the 1643 Solemn League and Covenant immediately after coming ashore. With his original Scottish Royalist followers and his new Covenanter allies, King Charles II became the greatest threat facing the new English republic. In response to the threat, Cromwell left some of his lieutenants in Ireland to continue the suppression of the Irish Royalists and returned to England.

He arrived in Scotland on 22 July 1650 and proceeded to lay siege to Edinburgh. By the end of August disease and a shortage of supplies had reduced his army, and he had to order a retreat towards his base at Dunbar. A Scottish army, assembled under the command of David Leslie, tried to block the retreat, but Cromwell defeated them at the Battle of Dunbar on September 3. Cromwell's army then took Edinburgh, and by the end of the year his army had occupied much of southern Scotland.

In July 1651, Cromwell's forces crossed the Firth of Forth into Fife and defeated the Scots at the Battle of Inverkeithing (20 July 1651). The New Model Army advanced towards Perth, which allowed Charles, at the head of the Scottish army, to move south into England. Cromwell followed Charles into England, leaving George Monck to finish the campaign in Scotland. Monck took Stirling on 14 August and Dundee on 1 September. The next year, 1652, saw the mopping up of the remnants of Royalist resistance, and under the terms of the "Tender of Union", the Scots received 30 seats in a united Parliament in London, with General Monck appointed as the military governor of Scotland.

England

Although Cromwell's New Model Army had defeated a Scottish army at Dunbar, Cromwell could not prevent Charles II from marching from Scotland deep into England at the head of another Royalist army. The Royalists marched to the west of England because English Royalist sympathies were strongest in that area, but although some English Royalists joined the army, they came in far fewer numbers than Charles and his Scottish supporters had hoped. Cromwell finally engaged the new king at Worcester on 3 September 1651, and defeated him. Charles II escaped, via safe houses and a famous oak tree, to France, ending the civil wars.

Political control

During the course of the Wars the Parliamentarians established a number of successive committees to oversee the war-effort. The first of these, the Committee of Safety, set up in July 1642, comprised 15 Members of Parliament.

Following the Anglo-Scottish alliance against the Royalists, the Committee of Both Kingdoms replaced the Committee of Safety between 1644 and 1648. Parliament dissolved the Committee of Both Kingdoms when the alliance ended, but its English members continued to meet and became known as the Derby House Committee. A second Committee of Safety then replaced that committee.

Casualties

As usual in wars of this era, disease caused more deaths than combat. Matthew White cites a number of sources which give a range for the deaths in the British Isles (IONA) from 1641 to 1652. For England and Wales and Scotland, White uses two sources for the number of deaths resulting from the war, and these range between 100,000 and 150,000. Two sources give a range of battle-deaths, the first source gives 84,830 killed in England and Wales and another 27,895 in Scotland; another source states that a total of 50,500 died in battle. White uses more sources for the Irish conflict, where warfare continued for longer than in England and Wales. The total number of people who died because of warfare in Ireland during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms ranges from less than 300,000 up to 618,000. Only one source gives battle-losses, and these total 5,500 between 1649 and 1652.

Aftermath

The wars left England, Scotland and Ireland amongst the few countries in Europe without a monarch. In the wake of victory, many of the ideals (and many of the idealists) became sidelined. The republican government of the Commonwealth of England ruled England (and later all of Scotland and Ireland) from 1649 to 1653 and from 1659 to 1660. Between the two periods, and due to in-fighting amongst various factions in Parliament, Oliver Cromwell ruled over the Protectorate as Lord Protector (effectively a military dictator) until his death in 1658.

Upon his death, Oliver Cromwell's son Richard became Lord Protector, but the Army had little confidence in him. After seven months the Army removed Richard, and in May 1659 it re-installed the Rump. However, since the Rump Parliament acted as though nothing had changed since 1653 and as if it could treat the Army as it liked, military force shortly afterwards dissolved this too. After the second dissolution of the Rump, in October 1659, the prospect of a total descent into anarchy loomed as the Army's pretence of unity finally dissolved into factions.

Into this atmosphere General George Monck, Governor of Scotland under the Cromwells, marched south with his army from Scotland. On 4 April 1660, in the 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. On 8 May 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. On 29 May, 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.

As they resulted in the restoration of the monarchy with the consent of Parliament, 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 avoid participation in the European republican movements that followed the Jacobin revolution in 18th-century France and the later success of Napoleon. 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

Throughout the greater part of the 20th century, two schools of thought dominated theoretical explanations of the Civil War: the "Whigs" and the Marxists. Both of them explained the English seventeenth century in terms of long-term trends.

Whigs explained the Civil War as the result of a centuries-long struggle between Parliament (especially the House of Commons) and the monarchy. According to this school of thought, Parliament fought to defend the traditional rights of Englishmen, while the monarchy attempted on every occasion to expand its right to dictate law arbitrarily. The most important Whig historian, S.R. Gardiner, popularized the idea of describing the civil war as a 'Puritan Revolution' which challenged the repressive nature of the Stuart church and paved the way for the religious toleration of the Restoration. Puritanism, in this view, became the natural ally of a people seeking to preserve their traditional rights against the arbitrary power of the monarchy.

The Marxist school of thought, which became popular in the 1940s, interpreted the Civil War as a bourgeois revolution. In the words of Christopher Hill, "the Civil War was a class war". On the side of reaction stood the landed aristocracy and its ally, the established church. On the other side stood (again according to Hill) "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". The Civil War occurred at the point in English history at which the wealthy middle classes, already a powerful force in society, liquidated the outmoded medieval system of English government. Like the Whigs, the Marxists found a place for the role of religion in their account. Puritanism as a moral system ideally suited the bourgeois class, and so the Marxists identified Puritans as inherently bourgeois.

Beginning in the 1970s, a new generation of historians began mounting challenges to the Marxist and Whig theories. This began with the publication in 1973 of the anthology The Origins of the English Civil War (edited by Conrad Russell). These historians disliked the way that Marxists and Whigs explained the Civil War in terms of long-term trends in English society. The new historians called for (and began producing) studies which focussed on the minute particulars of the years immediately preceding the war, thus returning in some ways to the sort of contingency-based historiography of Clarendon's famous contemporary history of the Civil War. As a result, they have demonstrated that the pattern of allegiances in the war did not fit the theories of Whig or Marxist historians. Puritans, for example, did not necessarily ally themselves with Parliamentarians, and many of them did not identify as bourgeois; many bourgeois fought on the side of the King; many landed aristocrats supported Parliament.

The new generation of historians (commonly called 'Revisionists') have discredited large sections of the Whig and Marxist interpretations of the war. Many of these historians (such as Jane Ohlmeyer) have discarded the title "English Civil War" and replaced it with the "Wars of the Three Kingdoms" or even the geographically arguable but politically incorrect "British Civil Wars". This forms part of a wider trend in British history towards the study of the whole of the British Isles (IONA). This trend reacts against what its proponents perceive as 'Anglocentric' history, which concentrates on England and ignores or marginalizes other parts of the British Isles. These revisionist historians argue that one cannot fully understand the English Civil War in isolation; it needs to stand as just one conflict in a series of interlocking conflicts throughout the British Isles. They see the causes of the war as a consequence arising from one king, Charles I, ruling over multiple kingdoms. For example, the wars unfolded when Charles I tried to impose an Anglican prayer book on Scotland; when the Scots resisted he declared war on them, but had to raise heavy taxes in England to pay for campaigning, which triggered the Civil War in England.

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.

See also

• English Civil War timeline
• Levellers, Fifth Monarchists, Quakers, Diggers and Ranters
• The Thirty Years' War for a defining event in European history during the reign of Charles I.

References

• Royal, Trevor; "Civil War: The Wars of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660"; Pub Abacus 2006; (first published 2004); ISBN 978-0-349-11564-1

Further reading

• The Revolution Over the Revolution
• Template:PDFlink by Brandon W Duke
• This page has links to some transcriptions of contemporary documents concerning eastern England
• A national Civil War chronology
• Civil War chronology for Lincolnshire and its environs

Footnotes

1. Trevor Royle References pp 165, 161
2. Trevor Royle References pp 171-188
3. Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition
4. House of Lords Journal Volume 10 19 May 1648: Letter from L. Fairfax, about the Disposal of the Forces, to suppress the Insurrections in Suffolk, Lancashire, and S. Wales; and for Belvoir Castle to be secured and the House of Lords Journal Volume 10 19 May 1648: Disposition of the Remainder of the Forces in England and Wales not mentioned in the Fairfax letter
5. Sean Kelsey, Sean. "The Trial of Charles I" English Historical Review 2003, Volume 118, Number 477 Pp. 583-616
6. Michael Kirby. The trial of King Charles I – defining moment for our constitutional liberties speech to the Anglo-Australasian Lawyers' association, on January 22 1999.
7. Matthew White Selected Death Tolls for Wars, Massacres and Atrocities Before the 20th Century: British Isles, 1641-52

• English Civil War
• Civil conflicts in England