The wars of three kingdoms
I found Kishlansky’s account of the Wars of Three Kingdoms very persuasive, probably the best thing in this book. When you write history you have a choice of the level you want to pitch the narrative, the levels being something like:
- superficial
- good summary
- summary with some detail
- lots of detail
- too much detail
As I explained in my review of Peter H. Wilson’s book about the Thirty Years War, Wilson definitely goes into ‘too much detail’, drowning the reader in specifics while failing to point out important turning points or patterns.
Kishlansky, by contrast, hits what, for me, was the perfect level of description, ‘incisive summary with some detail’.
As an example of really useful summary, take the way he tells us that, put simply, the first three years of the civil war in England (1642-5) consisted mostly of smallish regional armies engaging in small skirmishes or sieges of local centres.
Now I’ve read scores of accounts of the English civil war which give lengthy descriptions of each of these ‘skirmishes’ along with detail of the army groups involved, their leaders, maps and deployments, and so go on for hundreds of pages. At a stroke Kishlansky makes it clear that most of them didn’t, ultimately, matter.
What mattered were a handful of decisions or turning points, such as the king withdrawing his forces after the Battle Brentford in November 1642, the one moment when he had the chance to capture London. Kishlansky is very good on the three famous key battles which he does describe in compelling detail – Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby.
But above all, Kishlansky doesn’t lose sight of the fact that the fighting was almost a sideshow compared to the extremely complicated political manoeuvring which went on continuously from 1642 to 1649.
Like many accounts, he almost forgets the Royalist side altogether because the real action was the disagreements within the Parliamentary side, among the Roundheads. Kishlansky brings out how the Presbyterian party within Parliament rose to eminence on the back of their close connections with the invading Scots, lorded it over Parliament for a few years, but then themselves began to appear as an overbearing ‘enemy’ to the growing power of the Independents in Cromwell’s New Model Army, before they were eventually expelled from Parliament and some of them arrested.
Only a close reading of the series of events and the complex political negotiations which went on against a continuously changing backdrop can bring out the fast-moving complexity of the situation, and the tremendous pressures the key actors found themselves under.
This is why, although I’ve read about 40 books about the British civil wars, by far the best remains The King’s Peace (1955) and The King’s War (1958) by Dame Veronica Wedgwood. They are old, now, but they are the only ones I know of which simply describe the events in the order they happened; and as they do so, you realise what a relentless helter-skelter of crises it was.
Only Wedgwood’s books really convey the way the unstoppable torrent of events happening in three separate kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland) interacted and exacerbated each other, to create a continuous sense of political and military crisis, which got worse and worse, and how the fighting, the wars themselves, news of defeats and paranoia about attacks on London and conspiracies and fifth columnists, also contributed to the feverish political atmosphere of the times.
Just like the French Revolution, lofty ideals and principles may have been expressed by various parties, and political historians and left-wing sympathisers with the Levellers and the Diggers, like to dwell on these – but as soon as you look at what actually happened you realise all sides were struggling to react to events which were almost always beyond their control.
There are many ways of interpreting the character and achievements of Oliver Cromwell, but when you read Wedgwood’s thrilling and gripping accounts, you realise it’s easy to overlook the most elementary fact about him, which is that he was able to ride the wild tiger of events in a way no-one else could.
Timeline of the Wars of Three Kingdoms
1640
13 April – first meeting of the Short Parliament
5 May – Charles dissolves the Short Parliament
26 October – Charles forced to sign the Treaty of Ripon
3 November – First meeting of the Long Parliament
11 December – the Root and Branch Petition submitted to the Long Parliament
1641
July – the Long Parliament passes ‘An Act for the Regulating the Privie Councell and for taking away the Court commonly called the Star Chamber’
July – Charles returns to Scotland and accedes to all Covenanter demands
August – the Root and Branch Bill rejected by the Long Parliament
October – outbreak of the Irish Rebellion creating panic in London
1 December – The Grand Remonstrance is presented to the King
December – The Long Parliament passes the Bishops Exclusion Act
1642 until the outbreak of the war
4 January – Charles unsuccessfully attempts to personally arrest the Five Members (John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Sir Arthur Haselrig, and William Strode) on the floor of the House of Commons
January – on the orders of the Long Parliament, Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet seizes the arsenal at Kingston upon Hull
5 February – the bishops of the Church of England are excluded from the House of Lords by the Bishops Exclusion Act
23 February – Henrietta Maria goes to the Netherlands with Princess Mary and the crown jewels
5 March – the Long Parliament passes the Militia Ordinance
15 March – the Long Parliament proclaims that ‘the People are bound by the Ordinance for the Militia, though it has not received the Royal Assent’
April – Sir John Hotham, 1st Baronet refuses the king entrance to Kingston upon Hull
2 June – The Nineteen Propositions rejected
May – The Irish rebellion ends
3 June – The great meeting on Heworth Moor outside York, summoned by Charles to gather support for his cause
July – Charles unsuccessfully besieges Hull
July – Parliament appoints the Committee of Safety
1642 – war begins
22 August -King Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham and the war commences
23 August – Battle of Southam, first sizeable encounter between Royalist & Parliamentarian forces.
19 September – Charles’s Wellington Declaration
23 September – Battle of Powick Bridge
29 September – The Yorkshire Treaty of Neutrality signed, but repudiated by Parliament 4 October
17 October – King Charles I passes through Birmingham, the towns folk seize the King’s carriages, containing the royal plate and furniture, which they convey for security to Warwick Castle, a parliamentary stronghold. The same day there was a skirmish at Kings Norton
23 October – Battle of Edgehill
1 November – Battle of Aylesbury
12 November, Battle of Brentford
13 November – Battle of Turnham Green
17 December – Declaration of Lex Talionis
1 December – Storming of Farnham Castle
Early December – Battle of Muster Green
22 December – Siege of Chichester begins
23 December – Bunbury Agreement designed to keep Cheshire neutral during the Civil War (failed)
27 December – Siege of Chichester ends
1643
19 January – Battle of Braddock Down
28 January – the Long Parliament sends commissioners to negotiate the Treaty of Oxford (unsuccessful)
19 March – Battle of Hopton Heath
30 March – Battle of Seacroft Moor
3 April – Battle of Camp Hill — a Royalist victory
8-21 April – Siege of Lichfield — a Royalist capture
25 April – Battle of Sourton Down — Parliamentarian victory
16 May – Battle of Stratton — Royalist victory
29–31 May – Siege of Worcester — Parliamentarians failed to capture
16 June – the Long Parliament passes the Licensing Order
18 June – Battle of Chalgrove Field — John Hampden, hero of resistance to Ship Money, mortally wounded during the battle and dies on Saturday evening of 24 June 1643
30 June – Battle of Adwalton Moor
1 July – first meeting of the Westminster Assembly
4 July – Battle of Burton Bridge
5 July – Battle of Lansdowne (or Lansdown) fought near Bath
13 July – Battle of Roundway Down fought near Devizes
20 July – Battle of Gainsborough
26 July – Storming of Bristol
17 August – the Church of Scotland ratifies the Solemn League and Covenant
2 September – Beginning of Siege of Hull (1643)
18 September – Battle of Aldbourne Chase
20 September – First Battle of Newbury
25 September – the Long Parliament and the Westminster Assembly ratify the Solemn League and Covenant. Under the terms of the deal with Scotland, the Committee of Safety is superseded by the Committee of Both Kingdoms
11 October – Battle of Winceby
1644
26 January – Battle of Nantwich
3 February – Siege of Newcastle, formal request to surrender to the Scots
29 March – Battle of Cheriton
28 May – Storming of Bolton and the Bolton Massacre
29 June – Battle of Cropredy Bridge
2 July – Battle of Marston Moor
13 September – Second Battle of Aberdeen
19 October – Siege of Newcastle ends with the storming of the city by Scottish soldiers
24 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance of no quarter to the Irish
27 October – Second Battle of Newbury
23 November – first publication of Areopagitica by John Milton
4 November – the Long Parliament sends the Propositions of Uxbridge to the king at Oxford
1645
6 January – the Committee of Both Kingdoms orders the creation of the New Model Army
28 January – the Long Parliament appoints commissioners to meet with the king’s commissioners at Uxbridge
22 February – negotiations over the Treaty of Uxbridge end unsuccessfully
23 April – the Long Parliament passes the Self-denying Ordinance
9 May – Battle of Auldearn
30 May – Siege & sacking of Leicester
14 June – Battle of Naseby
2 July – Battle of Alford
10 July – Battle of Langport
15 August – Battle of Kilsyth
13 September – Battle of Philiphaugh
24 September – Battle of Rowton Heath
October – fear of Royalist attack in south Lincolnshire
Charles goes to Welbeck, Nottinghamshire
17 December – siege of Hereford ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
1646
18 January – Siege of Dartmouth ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
3 February – Siege of Chester ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison after 136 days
16 February – Battle of Torrington victory for the New Model Army
10 March – Ralph Hopton surrenders the Royalist army at Tresillian bridge in Cornwall
21 March – Battle of Stow-on-the-Wold the last pitched battle of the First Civil War is a victory for the New Model Army
13 April – Siege of Exeter ends with the surrender of Royalist garrison
5 May – Charles surrenders to a Scottish army at Southwell, Nottinghamshire
6 May, Newark falls to the Parliamentarians
24 June – Siege of Oxford ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
22 July – Siege of Worcester ended with the surrender of Royalist garrison
27 July – after a 65-day siege, Wallingford Castle, the last English royalist stronghold, surrenders to Sir Thomas Fairfax
19 August – Royalist garrison of Raglan Castle surrendered (Wales)
9 October – the Long Parliament passes the Ordinance for the abolishing of Archbishops and Bishops in England and Wales and for settling their lands and possessions upon Trustees for the use of the Commonwealth
1647
13 March – Harlech Castle the last Royalist stronghold in Wales surrenders to the Parliamentary forces
29 May – General Council of the Army drew-up the Solemn Engagement
3 June – Cornet George Joyce (a junior officer in Fairfax’s horse) with a troop of New Model Army cavalry seizes the King from his Parliamentary guards at Holdenby House and place him in protective custody of the New Model Army
4–5 June – at a rendezvous on Kentford Heath near Newmarket the officers and men of the New Model Army give their assent to the Solemn Engagement
8 June – General Fairfax sends the Solemn Engagement to Parliament along with a letter explaining that the King was now in the custody of the Army negotiations would be conducted through New Model Army representatives
1 August – General Council of the Army offers the Heads of Proposals
31 August – Montrose escapes from the Highlands
October – An Agreement of the People for a firm and present peace upon grounds of common right presented to the Army Council
28 October – Beginning of the Putney Debates which end on 11 November
26 December – a faction of Scottish Covenanters sign The Engagement with Charles I
The Second English Civil War, 1648
8 May – Battle of St. Fagans
16 May(?) – 11 July Siege of Pembroke
1 June – Battle of Maidstone
13 June–28 August – Siege of Colchester
17 August–19 August – Battle of Preston
19 August – Battle of Winwick Pass
28 August – On the evening of the surrender of Colchester, Royalists Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle are shot
15 September – Treaty of Newport
November – leaders in the army draft the Remonstrance of the Army
6 December – Pride’s Purge, when troops under Colonel Thomas Pride remove opponents of Oliver Cromwell from Parliament by force of arms resulting in the so-called ‘Rump Parliament’
1649
15 January – An Agreement of the People of England, and the places therewith incorporated, for a secure and present peace, upon grounds of common right, freedom and safety presented to the Rump Parliament Parliament
20 January – the trial of Charles I of England by the High Court of Justice begins
27 January – the death warrant of Charles I of England is signed
30 January – Charles I of England executed by beheading – the Rump Parliament passes an Act prohibiting the proclaiming any person to be King of England or Ireland, or the Dominions thereof
5 February – The eldest son of Charles I, Charles, Prince of Wales, proclaimed ‘king of Great Britain, France and Ireland’ by the Scottish Parliament at the Mercat Cross, Edinburgh
7 February – The Rump Parliament votes to abolish the English monarchy
9 February – publication of Eikon Basilike, allegedly by Charles himself
14 February – the Rump Parliament creates the English Council of State
February – Charles II proclaimed king of Great Britain, France and Ireland by Hugh, Viscount Montgomery and other Irish Royalists at Newtownards in Ulster
9 March – Engager Duke of Hamilton, Royalist Earl of Holland, and Royalist Lord Capel beheaded at Westminster
17 March – an Act abolishing the kingship is formally passed by the Rump Parliament
24 March – The capitulation of Pontefract Castle which, even after the death of Charles I, remained loyal to Charles II
1 May – AN AGREEMENT OF THE Free People of England. Tendered as a Peace-Offering to this distressed Nation, an extended version from the Leveller leaders, being ‘Lieutenant Colonel John Lilburne, Master William Walwyn, Master Thomas Prince (Leveller), and Master Richard Overton, Prisoners in the Tower of London, May the 1. 1649.’
October – first publication of Eikonoklastes by John Milton, a rebuttal of the pro-Charles Eikon Basilike
Third English Civil War, 1650
1 May – Treaty of Breda signed between Charles II and the Scottish Covenanters
23 June – Charles II signs the Solemn League and Covenant
3 September – Battle of Dunbar, Scotland
1 December – Battle of Hieton, Scotland (skirmish)
1651
1 January – Charles II crowned King of Scots at Scone, prepares an army to invade England
20 July – Battle of Inverkeithing
25 August – Battle of Wigan Lane (skirmish)
28 August – Battle of Upton (the start of the western encirclement of Worcester)
3 September – Battle of Worcester: complete defeat of Charles II’s Scottish army
3 September – start of the escape of Charles II
6 September – Charles II spends the day hiding in the Royal Oak in the woodlands surrounding Boscobel House
16 October – Charles II lands in Normandy, France, after successfully fleeing England
END OF THE CIVIL WARS IN ENGLAND
Causes of the British Civil Wars
Along with the causes of the First World War, the causes of the English Civil War or the Wars of Three Kingdoms are one of the most over-determined and over-explained events in British history.
In a previous blog post I’ve outlined the multiple economic, financial, legal and religious issues facing King Charles when he came to the throne in 1625 and which grew steadily worse through the late 1620s and 1630s.
Exponents of the Whig theory of history say that the war was inevitable because Charles’s medieval Divine Right theory of kingship had to be cleared out of the way to allow more modern liberal freedoms to develop, a historically inevitable process. On this view, this inevitable march of progress suffered a further temporary setback under the brief reign of the Catholic King James II, before the Glorious Revolution of 1688 forced him into exile, installed the solidly Protestant King William III in his place and ushered in a new era of characteristically English liberties and freedom, i.e. the two revolutions led to England having the most democratic and liberal political system in Europe.
Marxist historians (such as Christopher Hill) offer a similarly teleological interpretation i.e. the sense that the civil wars were inevitable, but from a Marxist point of view. For them, the civil war was caused by the historically inevitable rise of the bourgeoisie, that’s to say the backers of new companies and ventures, especially in Britain’s new colonies, the City merchants who backed the East India Company and the new commercial ventures in America and Africa. These were the most economically and socially dynamic parts of British society and so had to overthrow the shackles of the king’s medieval view of economics and finance (i.e. the king’s total control of monopolies and trade) in order to create a more modern legal and economic model framework for business and trade.
I read and was impressed by the inevitabilist model in my 20s and 30s, but since then I have come to side with the ‘revisionist’ accounts I read in the 1990s, the more modern view that the civil wars were a gigantic accident. That there was nothing inevitable about them. Our nearest European neighbours didn’t experience rebellions in the name of either constitutional freedom or of bourgeois businessmen struggling to make the world safe for capitalism.
In this view, Charles definitely faced huge problems in trying to manage highly polarised factions in three different kingdoms – but it could have been done. Look at some of Charles’s contemporaries:
- The kings of Spain not only managed their own fractious nations but territories as remote as the Netherlands, parts of Italy and, of course, an entire empire in the New World.
- The Holy Roman Emperor managed a complex array of kingdoms, including Austria, Bohemia and Hungary.
Although these rulers encountered severe problems during this exact period – Spain was eventually forced to concede the Netherlands their independence – in both of them the monarch not only triumphed but emerged stronger from civil conflicts.
Similarly, France experienced a civil war which is known as the Fronde between 1648 and 1653 and which was also sparked by the king raising deeply unpopular new taxes. And yet Louis XIV not only triumphed over his enemies, but led France to become the strongest power on continental Europe.
In other words, the mid-17th century was certainly a deeply turbulent era of history, and any ruler of the three British kingdoms certainly faced extremely difficult problems – but a better ruler than Charles might have been able to manage it. He would not have provoked the Scottish Presbyterians as he did and, once provoked, he would have managed a Scottish solution. Instead Charles refused to make any compromise and so turned disaffection into open, armed rebellion. A more able ruler would have managed his relationship with Parliament better so that when the Irish Rebellion broke out in 1641, he could have worked with Parliament to solve it (i.e. put it down by military force). Instead, Charles had created a great coalition of enemies in Parliament, across the country, and then in Scotland so that when the external crisis of the Irish rebellion his the political system, instead of uniting the English, it turned into the lever that broke them apart.
In the same way, after reading so many hundreds of accounts of it, I take the outbreak of the First World War not to have been at all inevitable. There were lots of forces tending towards it, but previous flare-ups between the European powers had been successfully de-escalated at specially convened peace conferences, and there was no intrinsic reason why the little local crisis caused by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand couldn’t have been managed the same way, too.
It was a particular sequence of individual miscalculations and mistakes – the Austrians taking so long to present their ultimatum to Serbia and then Germany giving Austria blank check support – which triggered the war, and these could have been avoided.
I think there is a good case for arguing that there is a sort of technological inevitability to history – that certain inventions follow logically from each other and that these change the economic basis of society and social arrangements. Some countries are self-evidently more technologically advanced than others, and the nature of these technological developments follows a certain logic. Possibly there is a certain ‘path’ which nations follow in the name of ‘development’.
But I don’t think this translates into political inevitability. These technological developments can happen under capitalist or communist, democratic or authoritarian regimes. And nations with very advanced cultures e.g. China or India, never made the technological breakthroughs which happened in the West.
So I think political changes certainly reflect broad social and economic changes, but the way they are shaped and, quite often, the specific trigger points which really decide things one way or the other, are highly contingent on key individuals. The German High Command, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Roosevelt, Mao – these individuals had enormous, seismic impacts on the flow of events and the world we live in today.
In my own time, the long-term decline of heavy industries in Britain and their offshoring to India and China and other developing countries might have been ‘inevitable’ following the logic of technological development which I’ve suggested. But wasn’t at all inevitable that this process would be managed by the hatchet-faced government of Margaret Thatcher – and her personality and her personal beliefs made all the difference. Compare and contrast the way the same kind of de-industrialisation was managed in Germany or France.
Back to the 17th century, there were certainly long-term economic, social, political and religious issues which faced any ruler of Britain. But Charles I, John Pym and Oliver Cromwell played decisive roles in the outbreak and development of the wars of three kingdoms which were shaped by their characters, abilities and decisions.
For example, there was nothing ‘inevitable’ about the way a small-time East Anglian squire named Oliver Cromwell would turn out to be a military strategist and a political operator of genius, and so be able to not only manage the complex religious, political and military forces unleashed by over ten years of war, but then to go on and maintain England as a republic for ten further long years.
But above all, we’d never even have heard of Cromwell if Charles, at a number of key moments, had been prepared to make concessions – he might have averted war, or shortened the war, or ended it before he drove his opponents into the corner of having to execute him. Imagine what would have happened if he and Archbishop Laud never made their ill-fated journey back to Scotland, been appalled at the ragged state of the Scots Kirk and hadn’t decided to impose ‘unity’ i.e. an English prayer book, on the Scots. Or if he’d had the sense to simply consult the Scottish Parliament and Assembly of the Kirk during its drafting. Or had simply been prepared to make concessions when riots broke out at its first use in Scottish churches. None of those events were fore-ordained, they stem from the decisions of one person.
But instead of this sensible, collegiate approach, Charles’s narrow-minded inflexibility meant he literally couldn’t conceive of consulting anyone else about his decisions, nor of making any kind of compromise when he was opposed. These very specific aspects of Charles’s character were in now way ‘inevitable’ but were entirely contingent.
So, in my opinion, above everything else, the wars of three kingdoms were the direct, personal fault of the arrogant, uncompromising but weak King Charles I.
Books & Boots 