The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (45 page)

On 11 July the Houses of Parliament announced that Charles had begun the war, and a month later declared that all men who served the king were traitors. On 22 August, watched by his young sons Charles and James in their children’s armour (Charles II’s can still be seen in the Tower of London) the king unfurled the royal standard before the walls of Nottingham Castle. The Civil War had begun at last.

The Dutch artist Van Dyck, who became Charles I’s court painter just as Holbein had been Henry VIII’s, has left us with a vivid record of the major personalities of the court. With their colourful silk clothes, their lacy collars, their feathered hats and their charming lovelocks as their long, curling hair was called, they cannot help making a somewhat less serious impression than the Parliamentarians: they were not called Cavaliers for nothing. By the time the Civil War broke out, the extremism of the Puritans had ensured that Strafford and Laud were not the only high-minded, hardworking men to have supported Charles. Nevertheless a sort of artistic truth is to be found in the striking contrast between paintings of the two sides, court and Parliament. There is an absence of ornamentation about the Parliamentarians’ clothing and appearance–the dark cloth, the plain collars and the short hair cropped under a pudding basin that gave them the name Roundheads. And there is a terrible purposefulness in the portraits of Oliver Cromwell, Sir Ralph Hopton and General Ireton. Plain was their appearance, plain was their talk, and unlike the Cavaliers they had been in deadly earnest from the beginning, not just now when it was really too late.

Civil War (1642–1649)

From the very first luck seemed to be against the king. The royal standard with its prancing golden lions rampant blew down outside Nottingham Castle as soon as it had been put up, to everyone’s secret dismay. But before long the king’s men were too busy with preparations–unrolling maps, arranging for ammunition, calculating food and supply lines–to think about this bad omen. Nevertheless the news that the navy and the City of London had declared for Parliament could not be anything other than worrying. In the end those two factors would give the Puritans an outstanding advantage: thanks to the navy, the Parliamentary forces could move their troops far more quickly to trouble spots than the royalists could. The king’s soldiers had to go everywhere overland. The seaports too were an important part of the resistance to the king and prevented his troops from using their harbours. Mastery of the City meant that Parliament controlled the money supply from customs and trade. In the long run it would be extremely difficult for the king to pay for extra supplies of weapons or troops from abroad. Nevertheless just as the House of Commons at the outbreak of war had been evenly divided between the royalists and the Parliamentarians, so too was the country. The conflict would be very long drawn out.

For the Civil War turned into two linked civil wars. The first, which took place from 1642 to 1646, can be described in simple terms as the king versus the radicals–in other words, the half of Parliament led by Pym. In the course of the war, however, the aims of Parliament changed. The Parliamentary army itself became a separate revolutionary movement determined to resist the return of Charles I, who by then had drawn the Scots and most Parliamentary MPs on to his side. There was thus a second civil war in 1648 in which the army was triumphant. Parliament would be emasculated, the king executed, and a Commonwealth replaced the monarchy. After military triumphs against royalist armies raised in Ireland and Scotland, where the Presbyterians had crowned the Prince of Wales Charles II, the army leader Oliver Cromwell became lord protector–in effect a republican dictator. Seven years later in 1660 after the Commonwealth had degenerated into a new sort of tyranny under which Parliament was as powerless as it had been during the 1630s, the constitutional wheel came full circle: Charles II was restored to the throne by one of the republic’s ruling generals, George Monck.

When the First Civil War began in 1642, England more or less divided along the same geographical fault-line that it had done during the Wars of the Roses. The north, Wales, the south-west and the more rural parts were for the king, while London, the east, the south and the south-east, where there was a greater concentration of towns and commercial wealth, tended to support the Parliamentary cause. Within these categories there were of course exceptions. Inside generally royalist areas, the clothing towns–for example, in the West Riding of Yorkshire or in Somerset–would contain pockets of Parliamentary supporters, for almost all people who made their living by trade were Parliamentarians. The two universities, Oxford and Cambridge, were for the king, and had begun melting down their college silver to pay for arms (though Oliver Cromwell, as the local MP for Huntingdon, put a stop to that in Cambridge).

For the first two years of the war the king’s strategic aim was to reach London. He never got nearer than Turnham Green in Hammersmith, right at the beginning of the war. Then the sheer size of the London train-bands which had made such a nuisance of themselves outside Parliament under the Puritan Earl of Essex, Elizabeth’s favourite’s son, made Charles turn about and head for Oxford. Thanks to its enthusiasm for the still-imprisoned Laud, Oxford was vehemently pro-royalist, and the king made his headquarters there for the rest of the war. By and large the campaigns of 1643 were favourable to the royalist party. The king’s dashing nephew Prince Rupert, the son of the Elector Palatine and the Winter Queen, captured Parliamentary Bristol. Having defeated Lord Fairfax and his son Sir Thomas Fairfax at Adwalton Moor near Bradford, the Earl of Newcastle held all Yorkshire for the king except for Hull. Cornwall and Devon and the south-west up to Devizes in Wiltshire were royalist. The king’s men were further encouraged by the early deaths of two of their most inspiring opponents: Hampden died at Chalgrove Field in a battle with Prince Rupert, and Pym of cancer.

However, Plymouth, Hull and Gloucester were all serious threats to the royalists’ ability to maintain their position. Meanwhile one of Pym’s last actions had been to weight the scales of the war further in Parliament’s favour when he added the Scottish armies to Parliament’s cause. By an agreement of September 1643 known as the Solemn League and Covenant, in return for establishing Presbyterianism in England the Scots came in on Parliament’s side and lent it 20,000 men.

Charles too was looking for outside help. By an agreement with the Irish Catholic rebels called the Cessation, which meant he would cease to prosecute them, he had the help of an army from Ireland. But this also only confirmed the king’s reputation as a man determined to restore papistry in England through the hated Irish Catholics.

But the Scots army was a much more soldierly affair. After it joined the Parliamentary side, the tide of victory started to turn in the rebels’ favour. In July 1644, once the Scots had fought their way south to join up with the Fairfaxes in Yorkshire, one of the most important battles of the war took place. The king’s best generals, his nephew Prince Rupert and the Earl of Newcastle, were conclusively defeated at the Battle of Marston Moor. Hitherto Prince Rupert’s great weapon, his cavalry charge, had been irresistible. Now, however, he came up against the Eastern Association army, which had already covered itself with glory at Hull. These troops, raised from the eastern counties of Essex, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk, were very strongly Puritan–many of the emigrants to America had come from the same region.

The Eastern Association had gained a great reputation for their zeal and discipline. They were a new kind of Puritan soldier who sang hymns as they marched, who frowned on drinking, but who were as ferocious with the pike as any soldier fuelled on spirits. The most important figure in the Association was the profoundly religious Oliver Cromwell, the burly MP, who quite unexpectedly, since he had never been a soldier, was coming to the fore as a result of his exceptional military talent. In the first year of the war he had been so impressed by Prince Rupert’s use of cavalry at the Battle of Edgehill that he started training his own mounted troops. By Marston Moor the eastern counties cavalry were as proficient in the saddle as Prince Rupert’s men, and much more disciplined. In the end, that discipline, and the bravery of the Scots, turned the battle, and the royalists were routed. Cromwell said afterwards that ‘God made them as stubble to our swords.’ From that day forward the man who is also known as Old Noll for his large, potato-like nose would be christened Ironsides because no one could get through the iron sides of him and his men.

Losing Marston Moor meant that the royalist cause lost control of the north. Though the south-west continued to be held by the king’s generals, the defeated royalist army remained stationed in the midlands for the first half of 1645. Charles’s plan was that it should join up with royalist troops recently raised by the Marquis of Montrose from the Highlands of Scotland. In an extremely surprising turn of events, Montrose, who had been one of the leading spirits of the Covenanters, turned against his Calvinist allies and backed the royal cause. He hoped the chastened king could be brought to act in a more restrained and constitutional manner.

That same year Montrose swept through Scotland in a series of stunning victories and soon controlled almost the whole country. It was a feat made more remarkable by the fact that at the beginning of the campaign his cavalry had consisted of only three horses, and his army had comprised undisciplined Highland clans whose leisure time was passed by feuding with one another. But the combination of Montrose’s noble and inspiring personality and the clans’ traditional loathing of the Campbells, whose chief Argyll was the head of the Covenanters, had welded them into an unstoppably ferocious fighting force.

In the Parliamentary camp, meanwhile, the knowledge that the war was still not won was making its leaders reconsider the way their army was organized. Just as Parliament had been divided on the question how far they should go in rebelling against the king, the Parliamentary leaders themselves were also becoming divided about their cause. Despite their importance in the earlier constitutional battle between Parliament and King, figures like the Earl of Manchester (formerly Lord Mandeville) and Essex had become rather afraid of making all-out war on the king. Manchester had been heard to say that he thought the war would never be ended by the sword, only by discussion. Furthermore, he warned, ‘If we should beat the king ninety nine times and he beat us once we should all be hanged.’

These more moderate thinkers within the Parliamentary cause, who had a majority in the House of Commons, became known as the Presbyterian party when the question of what to do about the Church of England established a fault-line through which political divisions emerged. Their willingness to impose Presbyterianism on England through the Church, spoke of a respect for hierarchy that was opposed by the more radical Parliamentarians, the Puritan Independents who believed in religious toleration and whose leader in the Commons was Oliver Cromwell. Though the Independents were a minority party among MPs, most of the army was of their religious persuasion. The Independents tended to be more exaltedly religious men, belonging to the Independent religious sects and impelled by simple religious imperatives. They despised the Presbyterians’ softening attitude and believed that command should be taken away from people who were not prepared to go for outright victory over a wicked king.

After some adroit manoeuvring behind the scenes by Cromwell, in February 1645 the Self-Denying Ordinance deprived all members of the Houses of Parliament of their commands–only Cromwell himself was excepted in recognition of his remarkable skills as a general. Manchester and Essex were forced to retire and the Parliamentary forces were now called the New Model Army, controlled by Cromwell as lieutenant-general of cavalry under Sir Thomas Fairfax, who became commander-in-chief. The New Model Army was intensely religious, as the Eastern Association had been, and hero-worshipped Cromwell. As a sign that extremists among the Parliamentary forces were seizing power, Laud was at last executed.

Despite Montrose’s victories in Scotland, the year 1645 proved decisive for the Parliamentary armies. In June at the Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire the king’s army was even more conclusively trounced than it had been at Marston Moor. After a tremendous initial charge whose impetus completely broke up the left wing of the New Model Army under Henry Ireton, Prince Rupert never followed through. He indulgently allowed his cavalry to vanish from the battlefield to pillage the Parliamentary baggage train. In his absence Cromwell’s soldiers cleaned up. As the royalists fled, they left behind not only most of their arms cache but Charles I’s secret papers. These revealed that, in order to entice the Irish Catholic army to England, the king had promised to suspend the anti-Catholic laws; he was also plotting to pay for foreign troops to invade England, which his son Charles had left the country to arrange. This only confirmed the Parliamentarians’ darkest fears of a future England oppressed by absolutism and sinful Catholicism.

In September 1645 the king’s last hope of aid from the northern Scots died when Montrose was comprehensively defeated at Selkirk by the veteran Scots general David Leslie. Though the personal valour of Montrose’s Highland troops was incomparable, they did not understand the need to remain as an army at harvest time. Around August many melted away back to their glens. Meanwhile Montrose’s attempt to rally the Lowlands foundered on the Lowlanders’ Presbyterian hatred for Charles’s Irish Catholic allies. Montrose escaped to the continent, while that same month Charles’s last army outside Cornwall was defeated at Rowton Heath near Chester.

At the beginning of 1646 the king’s army even lost its hold on the west when Truro, the capital of Cornwall, surrendered to its besiegers. Thereafter the writing was on the wall. In May, as town after town fell and the Roundheads began to approach the royalist headquarters, Charles left Oxford and rode north to surrender to the Covenanter Scots camped at Newark. They took him on to Newcastle. Finally, in June, Oxford was captured by the Parliamentarians and the First Civil War was over.