The English Civil Wars ********************** (1642 - 1651) First Civil War (1642 - 1645) Second Civil War (1648 - 1649) Third Civil War (1649 - 1651) & The Commonwealth (1649 - 1653) The Republic (1653 – 1659) Restoration of Monarchy (1660) The English Civil Wars consisted of a series of armed conflicts and political manoeuvrings between the Royalists (known as Cavaliers), lead by King Charles I, and Parliamentarians (known as Roundheads) during the years 1642 to 1651. The first Civil war (1642 - 1645) ********************************* On 22 August 1642 at Nottingham, Charles raised the Royal Standard calling for loyal subjects to support him. The Battle of Edgehill in October 1642 showed that early on the fighting was even. Broadly speaking, Charles retained the north, west and south-west of the country, and Parliament had London, East Anglia and the south-east, although there were pockets of resistance everywhere, ranging from solitary garrisons to whole cities. However, the Navy sided with Parliament (which made continental aid difficult), and Charles lacked the resources to hire substantial mercenary help. Parliament had entered an armed alliance with the predominant Scottish Presbyterian group under the Solemn League and Covenant of 1643, and from 1644 onwards Parliament's armies gained the upper hand - particularly with the improved training and discipline of the New Model Army. The Self-Denying Ordinance was passed to exclude Members of Parliament from holding army commands, thereby getting rid of vacillating or incompetent earlier Parliamentary generals. Under strong generals like Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell, Parliament won victories at Marston Moor (1644) and Naseby (1645). The capture of the King's secret correspondence after Naseby showed the extent to which he had been seeking help from Ireland and from the Continent, which alienated many moderate supporters. It ended in defeat for Charles at the battles of Naseby in Northamptonshire and Langport in Somerset. After their victory the parliamentarians represented by Oliver Cromwell, Henry Ireton, Colonel Rainborough and other officers attempted to negotiate a settlement with Charles, in which they expected him to accept their demands for a constitutional monarchy. Although defeated and a prisoner he would not accept this, instead, he remained defiant provoking the Second Civil War. Second Civil War (1648 - 1649) ****************************** Although nearly all the Royalists who had fought in the First Civil War had given their parole not to bear arms against the Parliament, 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. The victory at the battle of Preston in Cumbria by the troops of Cromwell over the Royalists and Scots marked the end of the Second English Civil War. The betrayal by Charles, who showed himself incorrigible, dishonourable, and therefore responsible for unjustifiable bloodshed, caused Parliament to debate whether to return the King to power at all. Those who still supported Charles's 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 ordered them to try Charles for treason in the name of the people of England. Charles I was found guilty of high treason, as a "tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy". He was beheaded on a scaffold in front of the Banqueting House of the Palace of Whitehall on January 30, 1649. Third civil war (1649 - 1651) & the Commonwealth of England (1649 - 1653) ************************************************************************* With the monarchy overthrown, power was assumed by a Council of State, which included Oliver Cromwell, then Lord General of the Parliamentary Army. At the same time, however, Scotland recognized Charles II as his father's successor and proved unwilling to allow the English to decide the fate of their monarchy. Consequently, on 5 February 1649, Charles II was proclaimed King of Scots in Edinburgh. Charles himself soon came to despise his Scottish hosts. Nevertheless, the Scots remained Charles's best hope of restoration, and he was crowned King of Scots at Scone on 1 January 1651. With Cromwell's forces now threatening Charles's position in Scotland, it was decided to mount an attack on England. With many of the Scots refusing to participate, and with few English royalists joining the force as it moved south into England, the invasion ended in defeat at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651, following which Charles is said to have hidden in the Royal Oak at Boscobel House, subsequently escaping to France in disguise. Republic (1653 – 1659) ********************** Parliament continued to exist until Cromwell forcibly disbanded it in 1653. England and subsequently Scotland and Ireland became a united republic under Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector; a monarch in all but name: he was even "invested" on the royal coronation chair. Upon his death in 1658, Cromwell was briefly succeeded by his son, Richard Cromwell as Lord Protector. However, the new Lord Protector, with no power base in either Parliament or the New Model Army, was forced to abdicate in 1659. The Protectorate of England was abolished, and the Commonwealth of England re-established. Restoration of the Monarchy (1660) ********************************** During the civil and military unrest which followed, George Monck, the Governor of Scotland, was concerned that the nation would descend into anarchy. Monck and his army marched into the City of London and forced the Parliament to dissolve itself. For the first time in almost twenty years, the members of Parliament faced a general election. A year later in 1660, the election of a predominantly Royalists House of Commons, restored the monarchy and Charles I's son Charles II, became King. However, constitutionally, the wars established a precedent that British monarchs could not govern without the consent of Parliament. Sources: www.historylearningsite.co.uk www.putneydebates.com The long complicated version **************************** English Civil War and Revolution, 1603 - 1714 *********************************************** The Stuart dynasty spanned one of the most tumultuous periods in British history, years of civil war, assassination attempts, usurpations, national disaster and revolution. How did it all happen? Elizabeth I, the last of the Tudor monarchs, died in 1603 and the thrones of England and Ireland passed to her cousin, James Stuart. Thus James VI of Scotland also became James I of England. The three separate kingdoms were united under a single ruler for the first time, and James I and VI, as he now became, entered upon his unique inheritance. James had awaited Elizabeth's death with eager anticipation, because of the wealth and prestige the English crown would bring him. But, as this canny monarch must have known all too well, the balancing act he would henceforth be required to perform was not an easy one. England, Scotland and Ireland were very different countries, with very different histories, and the memories of past conflict between those countries - and indeed, of past conflict between different ethnic groups within those countries ran deep. To make matters trickier still, each kingdom favoured a different form of religion. Most Scots were Calvinists, most English favoured a more moderate form of Protestantism and most Irish remained stoutly Catholic. Yet each kingdom also contained strong religious minorities. In England, the chief such group were the Catholics, who initially believed that James would prove less severe to them than Elizabeth had been. When these expectations were disappointed, Catholic conspirators hatched a plot to blow both the new king and his parliament sky-high. The discovery of the Gunpowder Plot served as a warning to James, if any were needed, of the very grave dangers religious divisions could pose, both to his own person and to the stability of his triple crown. However - following the marriage of his daughter Elizabeth to Frederick V, elector of the Rhineland Palatinate; Frederick's crowning as king of Bohemia; and the forcible ejection of the young couple from their new kingdom by Catholic forces soon afterwards - James found himself being dragged into the continental Thirty Years' War. His health failing, the old king died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles, who initially threw himself into the fight against the Catholic powers, but eventually withdrew from the European conflict in 1630. Charles I was a conscientious and principled ruler, but he was also stubborn, reserved and politically maladroit. From the moment that he first assumed the crown, uneasy murmurs about his style of government began to be heard. Over the next 15 years, many of Charles's English subjects became alienated by his religious policies and by his apparent determination to rule without parliaments. Some, especially the more zealous Protestants, or 'puritans', came to believe in the existence of a sinister royal plot - one which aimed at the restoration of the Catholic faith in England and the destruction of the people's liberties. Similar fears were abroad in Scotland, and when Charles attempted to introduce a new prayer book to that country in 1637 he provoked furious resistance. Charles's subsequent attempts to crush the Scots by force went disastrously wrong, forcing him to summon an English parliament in October 1640. Once this assembly had begun to sit, Charles was assailed by angry complaints about his policies. At first, the king seemed to have practically no supporters. But as puritan members of parliament began to push for wholesale reform of the church and religious traditionalists became alarmed, Charles found himself at the head of a swelling political constituency. Then, in 1641, the Catholics of Ireland rose up in arms, killing many hundreds of the English and Scottish Protestants who had settled in their country. The rebellion caused panic in England, and made it harder than ever for a political compromise to be reached. Charles I and parliament could not agree and England began to divide into two armed camps. The civil war which broke out in 1642 saw a broadly Royalist north and west ranged against a broadly Parliamentarian south and east. Charles derived particular advantage from the support of the Welsh and the Cornish, who supplied him with many of his foot soldiers, while parliament derived still more advantage from its possession of London. In mid-1643, it looked as if the king might be about to defeat his opponents, but later that year the Parliamentarians concluded a military alliance with the Scots. Following the intervention of a powerful Scottish army and the defeat of the king's forces at Marston Moor in 1644, Charles lost control of the north of Britain. The following year, Charles was defeated by parliament's New Model Army at Naseby and it became clear that the Royalist cause was lost. Unwilling to surrender to the Parliamentarians, the king gave himself up to the Scots instead, but when they finally left England, the Scots handed Charles over to their parliamentary allies. Still determined not to compromise with his enemies, the captive king managed to stir up a new bout of violence known as the Second Civil War. Realising that the kingdom could never be settled in peace while Charles I remained alive, a number of radical MPs and officers in the New Model Army eventually decided that the king had to be charged with high treason. Charles was accordingly tried, found guilty, and beheaded in January 1649. In the wake of the king's execution, a republican regime was established in England, a regime which was chiefly underpinned by the stark military power of the New Model Army. England's new rulers were determined to re-establish England's traditional dominance over Ireland, and in 1649 they sent a force under Oliver Cromwell to undertake the reconquest of Ireland, a task that was effectively completed by 1652. Meanwhile, Charles I's eldest son had come to an agreement with the Scots and in January 1651 had been crowned as Charles II of Scotland. Later that year, Charles invaded England with a Scottish army, but was defeated by Cromwell at Worcester. The young king just managed to avoid capture, and later escaped to France. His Scottish subjects were left in a sorry plight, and soon the Parliamentarians had conquered the whole of Scotland. In 1653, Cromwell was installed as 'lord protector' of the new Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Over the next five years, he strove to establish broad-based support for godly republican government with scant success. Cromwell died in 1658 and was succeeded as protector by his son, Richard, but Richard had little aptitude for the part he was now called upon to play and abdicated eight months later. After Richard Cromwell's resignation, the republic slowly fell apart and Charles II was eventually invited to resume his father's throne. In May 1660, Charles II entered London in triumph. The monarchy had been restored. Charles II was an intelligent but deeply cynical man, more interested in his own pleasures than in points of political or religious principle. His lifelong preoccupation with his many mistresses did nothing to improve his public image. The early years of the new king's reign were scarcely glorious ones. In 1665 London was devastated by the plague, while a year later much of the capital was destroyed in the Great Fire of London. The Dutch raid on Chatham in 1667 was one the most humiliating military reverses England had ever suffered. Nevertheless, the king was a cunning political operator and when he died in 1685 the position of the Stuart monarchy seemed secure. But things swiftly changed following the accession of his brother, James, who was openly Catholic. James II at once made it plain that he was determined to improve the lot of his Catholic subjects, and many began to suspect that his ultimate aim was to restore England to the Catholic fold. The birth of James's son in 1688 made matters even worse since it forced anxious Protestants to confront the fact that their Catholic king now had a male heir. Soon afterwards, a group of English Protestants begged the Dutch Stadholder William of Orange - who had married James II's eldest daughter, Mary, in 1677 - to come to their aid. William, who had long been anticipating such a call, accordingly set sail with an army for England. James II fled to France a few weeks later and William and Mary were crowned as joint monarchs the following year. James II still had many supporters in Ireland, and in March 1689 he landed there with a French army. William now assembled an army of his own to meet this challenge, and in 1690 he decisively defeated James at the Battle of the Boyne. James promptly returned to France, leaving William free to consolidate his hold on power. The death of Mary in 1694 left William as sole ruler of the three kingdoms, and by 1700 all eyes were turning to the problem of the succession. Because neither William nor James II's surviving daughter, Anne, had any children, Protestants were terrified that the throne would eventually revert to James II, to his son, or to one of the many other Catholic claimants. To avert this danger, the Act of Settlement was passed in 1701, directing that after the deaths of William and Anne the throne would return to the descendants of James I's daughter, Elizabeth. Sophia, electress of Hanover, and her heirs thus became next in line to the English throne. In 1702, William died and was succeeded by Anne. Five years after this, a formal union of the kingdoms of England and Scotland was contrived, in order to ensure that there would be a Protestant succession in Scotland too. Henceforth England and Scotland officially became one country, and when Queen Anne, the last of the Stuart monarchs, died in 1714, it was to the throne of the United Kingdom of Great Britain that George I, the first of the Hanoverians, succeeded. By Professor Mark Stoyle