The English Civil War: A People's History

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Amid the political upheaval in London, the Catholic majority in Ireland rebelled, massacring hundreds of Protestants there in October 1641. Tales of the violence inflamed tensions in England, as Charles and Parliament disagreed on how to respond. In January 1642, the king tried and failed to arrest five members of Parliament who opposed him. Fearing for his own safety, Charles fled London for northern England, where he called on his supporters to prepare for war. After Fairfax, Cromwell and the New Model Army easily crushed the Royalist uprisings, hard-line opponents of the king took charge of a smaller Parliament. Concluding that peace could not be reached while Charles was still alive, they set up a high court and put the king on trial for treason. Charles was found guilty and executed by beheading on January 30, 1649 at Whitehall. Third English Civil War (1649-51)

The sources we’ve looked at take us beyond the textbooks and their usual focus on leaders like Oliver Cromwell. The story of war is the story of how it affected ordinary men, women and children, people like Nehemiah Wharton, who described his experiences as a soldier. Or Mary Baker, who pleaded for compensation after her property and possessions were plundered. Or the Liverpool widows, whose lives were devastated by the conflict. But the most interesting aspect of this book is the relationship between Cromwell and Charles I, which she describes until the execution of Charles I and the victory of Oliver Cromwell. It is this concentration on the small, personal act that makes Diane Purkiss's study of the English civil war such a rich one. For it is here, in the tiny gestures of the everyday - often contradictory, ambiguous or confused - that you begin to get close to what it would have been like to live through the nine momentous years from 1640 to 1649. While top-down or bottom-up historical accounts will tell you about the big shapes and grand arcs of the civil war - the "Grand Remonstrance", the carnage at Naseby, the cancelling of Christmas - it is in the odd, human details that you begin to touch the real texture of the times.But what about the soldiers themselves, and the people caught in the firing line? I’m here at the National Archives in Kew to find out more about what sources can tell us about them. The second part of the book, headed ‘England’s Recovery', the title a genuflection toward Joshua Sprigge’s Anglia Rediviva, is the story of how Parliament’s victory was England’s victory against the various foreign malefactors brought in by the Royalists (and by a Parliamentarian faction). The word ‘patriot’, Stoyle argues, had come to be identified with Parliament, which had for centuries been identified with the nation, perhaps particularly with the south and east—coincidentally the region most distant from the Celtic fringe. This identification seems, according to Stoyle, to be found across the social spectrum and across the military divide, with soldiers and villagers identifying themselves, Parliament, and their cause as a part of a struggle for England. The war within the country was strangely seen, not so much as a war between king and Parliament, but as a war that kept the two apart; an intrusion by ‘outlanders’. These best books on the English Civil Wars take on different focuses which bring to light different aspects of this history. The saddest aspect to these most difficult times, with too many deaths and too much devastation to the country, is that the authors show how revolutions often don’t work: the revolutionaries didn’t get what they wanted, and in many ways everything reverted to the way it was: an entrenched monarchy, an entrenched political system, and an entrenched religion.

Once war began all the Celtic fringe nations became embroiled in the English fears of invasion. The prevalence of Welsh troops in the king’s army was particularly noted in the early stages of the war. This had origins in a general mistrust of the Welsh within England, and was given a sharp edge by the Roman Catholicism of the earl of Worcester, appointed lord lieutenant of Wales. Member of Parliament Oliver Cromwell commented that he feared another Ireland—a further papist rebellion—in Wales, in the run up to war in England, because of this laboured but perceived-as-potent link between Wales and rebellious Catholic Ireland. The Welsh Royalists were described in vitriolic terms as barbarous and thieving foreigners. That this affected the minds of the Welsh is undoubted; Stoyle suggests that there were fears amongst the Welsh that Parliament desired their extirpation in the latter stages of the war when its forces made significant incursions into Wales. There were occasions that would give rise to that expectation; the barbarous murder of the garrison at Canon Frome being just one example of seeming ‘special treatment’. Yet, to confuse matters, this massacre was carried out by Scottish troops, not English Parliamentarians. The petition blames the Royalist army for the carnage and plunder. And in this source, they’re saying to Parliament, “we supported you, we made sacrifices and now we want compensation for this”.

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The two sources we’ve looked at give us a great sense of the war’s immediate impact upon men and women. But we need a longer-term picture. And here’s a source that provides it. In December 1641, Parliament narrowly voted in favour of the Grand Remonstrance . This was a list of demands for Charles to make further reforms. Even some MPs felt this went too far. Charles refused to agree to the Grand Remonstrance.

The World Turned Upside Down is criticized for not being historical and factual enough, but it is informative and fascinating and shows a great strength in English thinking and a strong, zealous revolutionary spirit. On July 2, 1644, Royalist and Parliamentarian forces met at Marston Moor, west of York, in the largest battle of the First English Civil War. A Parliamentarian force of 28,000 routed the smaller Royalist army of 18,000, ending the king’s control of northern England. In 1645, Parliament created a permanent, professional, trained army of 22,000 men. This New Model Army, commanded by Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, scored a decisive victory in June 1645 in the Battle of Naseby, effectively dooming the Royalist cause. Second English Civil War (1648-49) and execution of King Charles I Diane Purkiss in The English Civil War gathers together and weaves beautifully letters, plays, ballads and memoirs of actual participants of events during this time. She focuses on the relationship between Oliver Cromwell and Charles I, using eyewitness accounts to tell her story. Little Marjorie's Secret - G. Norway (1898?; same characters as The Heroine of the Fire ... both published by the Religious Tract Society)Politics was the second hot topic; most of these radical sects spoke against the upper class, they supported the Parliamentarians, they opposed the union of church and state. They also wanted moral freedom, and more sexual freedom, more freedom in all things altogether.