A month of civil war! part eight

Yes, faithful readers, part eight has dawned already - and with it, we near the end of this overview of the English Civil War. 

There were effectively three civil wars in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, though it was the second conflict that saw the execution of Charles I and the introduction of the Republic. As I'm sure you'll remember, we left Charles riding into the parliamentary camp at Southwell, and royalist organisation effectively died with the king's surrender in 1646. There began a long period of negotiation throughout 1646, with Charles being seen as the lynchpin to control of the country by whichever faction could successfully treat with him, be they the Scots, the Independents, the New Model Army, or the Presbyterian government in Westminster. Charles clearly knew this, and so courted each side as he made the rounds through the country. In December, Charles made a play for Scottish support by agreeing to implement the Solemn League and Covenant, while he was being kept in Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. While this never officially happened, it was enough to garner some significant Scottish support in the war that followed.

It's important to note that Charles was not a prisoner during this time, and certainly nobody wanted to cut his head off. Remember, the Civil War had started in 1642 as a 'rescue mission' by Parliament. Charles was kept in a degree of luxury, albeit under guard, but in 1647 members of the Army captured him, setting in motion the events of the Second Civil War.

Round Two
The issue of pay was a long-standing one between the Army and Parliament, but when they captured Charles, Parliament used the issue to their advantage, withholding arrears in an attempt to coerce them into handing the king over. However, the officers of the New Model Army found themselves in an increasingly important position politically, because they held the king in their custody, and it was enough to make the Scots resume their alliance with Parliament's Presbyterian faction - and the remaining royalists, no less - and declare war on the army. 

The Second Civil War had the curious effect of almost reversing the factions of the earlier conflict, as the New Model Army mutinied and declared their support for the king in February 1648. The new Royalists were once the military instrument of Parliament. However, the military action of the Second war was comparatively short-lived, and has been described since more as a revolt than an actual civil war. 

Following the Army declaring for the king in February/March, a wave of uprisings broke out against parliament, swiftly put down by Cromwell, Fairfax and others. By August, the war was effectively over, when Charles' troops were roundly defeated at the Battle of Preston. Charles was in the north to meet with the Scottish support for his negotiations from December 1646, known as The Engagement, but Cromwell crushed the Scottish army and ended any hope of reinstating Charles as king.

The Rump
You'll remember, I'm sure, that I began this series by saying that it was on 1 January 1649 that Parliament decided to put Charles on trial. So, what happened to bring them to this point? 

At the end of the war, there was quite a high demand for the king to be punished, especially for inciting the second conflict, which was seen by many as wasteful and unnecessary. What is perhaps odd, though, is that many had thought the Charles' position during the first war was justifiable. Negotiations began to put Charles back on the throne as a constitutional monarch - that is, a king under the law. This had already been negotiated in Scotland, as part of the National Covenant of 1638 (remember, Charles ruled in Scotland separately to how he ruled in England and in Ireland). 

The idea of returning Charles to the throne infuriated many of the more die-hard Independents, including Cromwell, and on 6 December 1648 a contingent of the military was led into Parliament by Colonel Thomas Pride. Subsequently, any MP who had shown himself to be supportive of restoring Charles to the throne was removed from the House, and in Pride's Purge, about 200 MPs were forcibly removed from power. The remaining 75 MPs then formed the 'Rump' Parliament, which was to govern England for the foreseeable future.

Can they really try him?
The answer to this question is a lot more complicated than a simple yes or no, and a stunning example of legal manoeuvering, I have to admit! On 1 January, it is true that the Rump did not have the legal authority to try the king - much less try him for treason, which was defined on the statute books as killing the king (among other things). However, let's look at this in some more detail. 

English history isn't exactly replete with precedents, but similar situations have arisen in the past nonetheless. Edward II was asked by parliament to abdicate before he disappeared, for instance. In 1485, Henry VII actually amended the treason law to legitimize his own coup that overthrew Richard III, so that if the man who sat the throne wasn't the legal king, but only the king in name, it did not constitute treason to kill him. 

However, on 4 January 1649, the Rump passed a sort of preliminary vote that essentially gave themselves the right to try the king:
1) The people of the kingdom are the source of all just power, second only to God;
2) The House of Commons, being the elected body of the people, is therefore the source of all just power in the kingdom; therefore
3) The House of Commons has the sole legislative power in the kingdom.

How does this allow them to try the king? Well, the legal system in England was built in three stages: a bill must pass through the Commons, the Lords, then the King before it became law. During the war, this had broken down when Parliament was issuing its 'Ordnances' that were sort of emergency laws that didn't require the Lords or the Royal Assent, but the vote of 4 January basically made it law that the Lords and the King were not required to make a bill law. This is pretty mind-blowing stuff, but it does get worse. 

"Remember I am your King, your lawful King..."
With that established, the date for the king's trial was set for 20 January 1649. 150 commissioners were named to act as the jury, including six peers, though tensions remained high throughout the month, and their number was reduced to 135 before the trial, though it was decided that only 20 would actually be required to deliberate if necessary. As it happened, no more than 68 ever appeared at any one session during the trial. 

Charles Stuart, king of England, the Commons of England assembled in Parliament, being deeply sensible of the calamities that have been brought upon this nation, which is fixed upon you as the principal author of it...

So began the trial, with an acclamation of blame for the war firmly at the feet of the king. When the prosecutor actually charged him with treason, Charles was said to have laughed, before making his famous rebuttal, "I would know by what power I am called hither". Reading through the transcript of the trial, which was of course made by a Parliamentary scribe, I admit I had a degree of empathy with Charles: a group of men decides they have the power to hold a trial and, after amending the constitution to allow them to do so, they try him for treason, though it is clear that they have already decided his guilt before the date was even set. I would probably have laughed at them, as well. 

Charles was accused of abusing his executive powers as king, though the irony here is that the Rump Parliament effectively abused their powers when they did away with the legislative checks on power and gave themselves the power to pass a law. In principle, the Rump Parliament were as bad as the king they were trying. 

But, treason? 
It is undeniable that the charge of treason is a thorny one. As I said before, the Treason Act defined treason as the murder or attempted murder of the king, the heir apparent, the queen, or the lord chancellor of the kingdom, or the raising of arms against any of those four persons. The moment the Earl of Essex raised his army and pursued Charles through the midlands in 1642, he was arguably guilty of treason, and the subsequent civil war made the entire parliamentary cause treasonous. 

But history is written by the winners, of course, and Charles had raised arms against his country, and so was guilty before he even sat a trial. 

I sound like I am sympathizing strongly with Charles here, I know. I should say that my sympathies lie with the legal system, and I feel that the Rump Parliament abused that system for its own purposes when they did away with the Lords and the King. There can be no doubting that a king who raises arms against his own people has failed, of course. Charles' own belief in the divine right of kings ought to have prevented the civil war itself, as the belief states that God has chosen the king to govern his people fairly and justly. Charles' behaviour does smack strongly of a temper tantrum, of course, and so is unbecoming for a monarch, but I'm not sure that could justify the constitutional manipulation undertaken by the Rump to enforce its will. 

At any rate, Charles refused to formally answer the charges laid against him. Instead, he continually questioned, when he was allowed to speak, the legality of the court before which he was arraigned. It was, perhaps, a too subtle tactic. The commissioners were charging him with killing his own subjects, and Charles' defense, such as it was, was to question the authority of the men who questioned him. Despite several incidences of Charles appearing to be getting the better of the judges, who told him to stop with his line of questioning in what appears to be a blustering fashion, it ultimately proved fatal for him, as a defendant who enters no plea was assumed to have plead guilty by the law of the time. As such, Charles was found to be guilty on 24 January, and condemned to death.

Charles was, at this time, still king, which was affirmed by the clerk when he read the sentence. This was, therefore, something quite new in English history - the reigning king was sentenced to death while still in office by his own subjects. Again, pretty mind-blowing stuff! On 27 January, Parliament passed an act that made it illegal to declare any person to be king, though did not formally abolish the monarchy until 17 March. The House of Lords had, by that time, already been abolished on 6 February. 

Execution
It is perhaps common currency the story of Charles asking for two shirts on the morning of his execution, due to the unseasonably cold weather making him shiver. It is also fairly common knowledge that Parliament struggled to find a suitable executioner, the City's hangman having refused. In fact, Alexandre Dumas makes a bit of a tale out of this in Twenty Years After, the sequel to The Three Musketeers, where D'Artagnan et al race to save Charles from the block, only to be thwarted when the son of Milady roughly does the job himself. (If you haven't already, I can highly recommend reading Dumas' novels, which are full of swashbuckling adventure!).

After making a mournful speech, which was likely not heard beyond the scaffold due to the large crowd of soldiers that interposed between it and the people, Charles was executed in one clean stroke around 2pm. It was common practice for the executioner to hold the head by the hair to the crowd, and declare "Behold, the head of a traitor!", but the words were not spoken, presumably because the person who eventually acted as the headsman did not want to be recognised. 

Denied burial at Westminster Abbey, Charles was interred at St George's Chapel in Windsor Castle, with his head reattached. 

Interregnum
The execution of the king did not stop the fighting, which continued in Ireland until 1653 as the Third Civil War, and would again spark up later in the century. Oliver Cromwell vehemently opposed any idea that he would succeed Charles as king, but as leader of the Puritans in Parliament, he accepted the title of Lord Protector in 1653, and nominated his son Richard to succeed him in his place upon his death in 1658. It is perhaps quite ironic that Cromwell himself grew tired of rule by parliament and dissolved the Rump in 1653, echoing Charles' own frustrated actions all the way back in 1629. 

The army maintained significant power throughout the period of the Commonwealth, and when it appeared that the politicians were losing sight of the original aims of the civil wars, they had sufficient power as to force Richard Cromwell to dissolve Parliament in 1659, reinstated first the Rump Parliament, then the MPs who had been expelled in Pride's Purge of 1648, before finally negotiating to restore the monarchy itself in the person of the former Prince of Wales as Charles II.

But!
It would be remiss to think the Restoration of 1660 was a return to some form of 'old way'. Charles II was a constitutional monarch, but he was still allowed to dissolve parliament when needed: the 1664 Triennial Act stipulated that a parliament must meet every three years, but did away with the previous requirements that it could only be dissolved with its own permission. The Restoration was, instead, a re-imagining of what monarchy should be. Despite promising religious toleration in his Declaration of Breda made shortly before he returned to England, Charles II's first parliament passed a flurry of pro-Anglican laws that severely curtailed the powerbase of the Puritans, perhaps in the hope that they wouldn't start another war now that Charles had reopened the theatres...

So that's my month of Civil War finished! Only intended as a high-level overview, I hope it has inspired you to find out more, and maybe visit a battlefield or two! 

A month of civil war! part seven

Part seven already! 

We left the Civil War in 1644, with the forces of parliament in the ascendant. However, things weren't all that rosy in London, as cracks began to appear. However, this was perhaps inevitable, as opposition to Charles was based on several different grievances, which made for an already split group before the war officially broke out. So following Marston Moor, when a distinct group of MPs loosely led by the Earl of Manchester began to manoeuvre for peace negotiations rather than a total victory. Cromwell actually called him up on this in parliament, exposing the fractures between the groups who commanded the army further. 

This led to the Self-Denying Ordnance, which excluded from parliament any military commander, and vice-versa. It was the first step on the road to creating the New Model Army, which would prove to be so valuable to parliament in the further prosecution of the war. 

There was also a religious aspect to these divisions. Part of the agreement with Scotland that prefaced the Solemn League and Covenant was for religious reformation in England along the lines of the Church of Scotland, whose supporters were called Presbyterians. Opponents to this idea wanted no hierarchy within the church - no bishops, no presbyteries - and instead wanted the congregation to decide its own way for itself. These were called Independents, and much in they way they opposed a hierarchy in the church, they were also much less inclined to a restoration of the monarchy as time went on.

In April 1645, the New-Model Ordnance led to the creation of a new model of army, one cohesive unit under the control of parliament, rather than separate units commanded by MPs and lords in a loose coalition. The New Model Army, as it became known, was also notable for its religious heterodoxy. Following the lapsing of censorship in 1640, there was a degree of religious freedom, with many different sects and ideologies appearing. Many of the officers, however, were staunch Independents.

The Clubmen
I said at the beginning of this series that the civil war in England was not all that enthusiastically received. There is perhaps a tendency to think, after reading all of the accounts of the wars, that the country did suddenly fall one side of an imaginary divide, with royalists on one side, and parliamentarians on another. "Cheshire declared for the king" makes it sound like the entire county was pro-Charles, staunch to the last. That just isn't true, of course - landowners in Cheshire might declare for the king, but the rest of the people who lived there wanted nothing more than to continue on with their lives in as much peace as they were allowed. I suppose the biggest idea to take away from this is that, for most of the people in any particular county, it just didn't matter. 

However, when the war was brought home, and stampeding ranks of soldiers were ravaging the countryside on their way to one battle or another, it did matter. While many 'ordinary' people did fight in the war as part of the militia, the dispute between king and parliament was not what motivated them. But when their own livelihood was threatened, matters were taken in hand. 

And this is where the Clubmen come in. This is, for me, a wonderful expression of that 'ordinary' sentiment, of people who want to be left out of wars, but also of common sense. Literally bands of men with clubs and other farming implements, Clubmen first gathered in Worcestershire in 1645 to protect their lands and their families from the marauding soldiers who would frequently pass through, destroying land and seizing crops and other supplies as they went.

As time went on, organization became more sophisticated, with even local gentry who had desired to stay neutral in the war setting up bands of vigilante-like men to protect their lands. A third party to the war, they often tried to force peace on the warring factions. Perhaps understandably then, they were popular with neither side, and it wasn't long before military campaigns were taking account of the potential presence of Clubmen and moving against them.

On the road to Naseby
In 1645, Rupert was sent north to attempt to re-take control there. The New Model Army, after some early successes, then went to lay siege to Oxford, despite the fact that Charles had already left his capital. When this was discovered, Parliament, a little shamefacedly, gave full command of the army to Lord Fairfax, who immediately pursued Charles throughout the midlands. Charles and Rupert, having stormed Leicester, marched first to Newark for reinforcements before heading for Oxford and Fairfax. 

On a foggy 14 June, the opposing armies at first struggled to find each other. When battle eventually broke out, the infantry was so close that after one volley of musketfire things devolved into hand-to-hand combat. The royalist cavalry were forced to charge uphill, and it didn't take much for Cromwell's flank to defeat them. The remaining parliamentarian forces were able to encircle much of the royalist army, causing many to surrender or flee, with only Rupert's own regiment left standing. The King attempted to lead a charge to relieve them, but it is said his bridle was taken by the Earl of Carnwath, who dissuaded him from riding into certain death, and in the confusion his own bodyguards retreated from the field. 

With the royalists in disarray, and the New Model Army successful in its first major engagement, parliamentarian forces appear to have then run amok among the royal baggage train, killing at least one hundred female camp followers. This atrocity against civilians was nothing compared with the PR disaster that resulted from the capture of Charles I's personal correspondence, however. 

The King's Cabinet Opened
Remember how many people were convinced, in the 1630s, that Charles was some sort of closet-Catholic, and would ruin the kingdom because of it? Well, it turns out they were half-right. Charles' personal letters captured at the battle revealed that he was in secret talks with the Irish Catholic Confederation, as well as many Catholic nations on the continent, to supply him with troops to continue the war against parliament. Of course, parliament wasted no time in publishing these letters, to the general outcry of the public, and thus tipped public opinion firmly away from Charles. 

The remainder of 1645 was one disaster after another for the royalists. Prince Rupert appears to have been significantly depressed by the course of events, and surrendered Bristol to Fairfax on 10 September. Charles was horrified, and banished Rupert from the kingdom. Charles rode to Chester, but parliamentarian forces were dogging his every step, and his forces were repelled at Rowton Heath on 24 September. 

1646: The End 
With the New Model Army overrunning the south, royalist bastions began to fall like dominoes. In February 1646 at the Battle of Torrington, the royalist army was finally defeated in the field, and the New Model Army began mopping up the remnants. Charles, in what was quite possibly utter despair, rode into the Scottish camp at Southwell on 5 May. Oxford fell to parliament in June, and peace negotiations formally began in July. It seemed like the hostilities had come to an end. 

However, it was not to be so simple! Come back soon for the next installment in A month of civil war!

A month of civil war! part six

And we're back! I do hope you're enjoying this short series as much as me!

We left the civil war in 1643, with the Irish conflict at a truce and the Scots joining the parliamentarian armies following the Solemn League and Convent. 1644 saw a lot of action around the Midlands, as the balance of power shifted from the King to Parliament. In January, the royalists were defeated at Nantwich and many prominent generals were taken prisoner. Among them, George Monck, who took the Covenant and defected to Parliament. 

The Scottish appearance in the war put pressure on England from the north, of course, as their army was marching south. The Earl of Newcastle was put under tremendous pressure, and Rupert was tasked with his relief. However, when Newark was besieged in March 1644 by the Scots, Rupert was instructed to proceed there with all due speed - Newark being of strategic importance to the royalists in preventing a parliamentary advance into the royalist-held north. Rupert rode across country and surprised the parliamentarians, trapping them outside the city walls and forcing a surrender. Rupert's lifting of the siege became one of his greatest personal triumphs of the war.

In Parliament, the plan of attack was to combine the forces of Essex with the East Midlands divisions under the Earl of Manchester in one crushing attack against the king. (Incidentally, that's not Manchester, Lancashire, which was little more than a small village at the time, but Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire - the 'God' being left off the peerage title because of religious connotations). 

However, following the Siege of Newark that Rupert had lifted earlier in the year, the Eastern army was in no position to comply with this demand. However, that didn't mean parliament was out of tricks, and in May they lay siege to Oxford itself! With Maurice (Rupert's brother) troubling Lyme Regis, and Charles trying to re-take Bristol, Essex led his army to relieve Lyme Regis leaving the army marching on Oxford largely without support. 

On to Marston Moor

The Earl of Leven had ridden down from Scotland following the signing of the Covenant, around the same time as Sir Thomas Fairfax rode northwards to Hull, threatening York, the centre of royalist support in the north. The Earl of Newcastle split his army to defend both York and the Tyne, but when the Earl of Manchester came to reinforce Fairfax, things were getting distinctly warm for the royalists. 

Prince Rupert was busy throughout this time dashing about the north, liberating Liverpool before he then rode on to York. The parliamentarian forces, hearing Rupert had reached Knaresborough, rode out from York to meet him, though the Prince managed to outflank them and ride straight into York itself on 1 July 1644. Rupert met up with Newcastle in the city, who tried to convince him to ride south to join forces with the king, but Rupert ignored the advice and rode back to meet Essex. 

The armies met the following day at Marston Moor, just west of York. Rupert was outnumbered, and Newcastle was arguing strongly against fighting a pitched battle. However, Rupert didn't listen. With the Scots/Parliamentarians occupying the high ground, and royalist troops in the marshy lowland moor, this was never going to go well for the king's men.

As at Edgehill the previous year, early royalist charges led to the cavalry chasing down the routed troops or looting the baggage train. With fighting continuing throughout the night, and men fleeing the battlefield from both sides, the battle was brought to a close by the disciplined forces of the Eastern Association, under the command of Manchester's lieutenant general Oliver Cromwell. 4000 royalists were killed, with a further 1500 of the leaders captured; parliament claimed only 300 of their own allied force fell in the battle. Royalist survivors fled back to York, and Newcastle himself decided he had had enough and left the country altogether, going into exile in Hamburg the day after the battle. 

Rupert left York soon after, too quickly for the Scots/Parliamentarian force to capture him, so they instead resumed the siege of York, which surrendered on 16 July. Rupert's first defeat of the war was the beginning of the end of his legend of invincibility; it also marked the ascendancy of Oliver Cromwell as a leading force in parliament. The discipline of his troops was widely acknowledged as causing the parliamentarian victory, and brought him out of Manchester's shadow. 

What next?

Parliament's victory led to the ejection of the royalists from the north of England, but the war was far from over. The greatest problem for MPs was that they had a king who no longer had a place in the country. However, after achieving such a victory, many MPs thought they were now in a strong position to negotiate for peace. Others, however - Cromwell included - demanded a complete and utter parliamentarian victory. I'll look at this in greater detail next time...

A month of civil war! part five

Here we go again! Last time we looked at the beginnings of the war, culminating in the Battle of Edgehill on on 23 October 1642. Following the battle, Charles spent the winter securing his position at Oxford while Essex remained at Windsor. The Earl of Newcastle, William Cavendish - a stalwart supporter of the King, who was relied upon for financial assistance in the absence of the possibility of Charles raising taxes - began to march south to Newark and Nottingham, with the aim of securing the northern ports for the arrival of Queen Henrietta Maria from the United Provinces, where her daughter Mary was married to William II of Orange and who had pledged materiel for the war effort. Lord Derby's efforts throughout Cheshire and Lancashire enabled the royalists under Lord Byron at Chester could link up with Newcastle's forces in Nottinghamshire, securing the north for the King. As a precaution, parliamentary forces began to band together in the east, headed by Oliver Cromwell.

The war of words
It was in 1643 that the journalistic war began, with the royalist propaganda machine publishing the Mercurius Aulicus from Oxford. Parliament soon responded with their own Mercurius Britanicus. These newsbooks, along with over a dozen others that sometimes only lasted for an issue or two, attempted to put their own version of events across to the general public. Broadly speaking, the Aulicus portrayed the parliamentary forces as brutal thugs who frequently engaged in destructive behaviour, even such as attacks on cathedrals (as at Peterborough), while the Britanicus engaged in snide remarks about the King's position within his country, and the popish behaviour of the royalists. Indeed, there's an excellent description of Charles bouncing around the kingdom like a tennis ball, as the war became increasingly frenetic. 

1643 began quite badly for Charles, with Essex besieging Reading successfully in April. As the most significant of the fortresses in the buffer between royalist Oxford and parliamentarian London, its loss was dangerous, but the Queen eventually arrived in May with her convoy of materiel, and the King's fortunes began to change. In July, thanks to the brilliance of Charles' nephews Maurice of Simmern and Rupert of the Rhine, Bristol was in royalist possession - Bristol of course was England's second most-important port at this time. Essex' army at Reading was forced to withdraw due to the outbreak of disease, but Charles was unable to capitalize on his successes by marching on London due to dissent in the ranks. With armies largely made up of Yorkshiremen and Devon natives, but Parliament in control of Hull and Plymouth, the generals were unwilling to risk retaliations at their homes by moving against London. 

Instead, Charles moved west, and planned to attack Gloucester. After an ineffective siege, relieved by Essex, the royalists chased off the parliamentarian army and they arrived on 20 September at Newbury. 

The Battle of Newbury
Parliamentarian intelligence had given Essex to understand that Charles had retired to Oxford, so he led a leisurely retreat to London when in actual fact Prince Rupert's cavalry were gaining on them every day. When they eventually caught up, Rupert harassed the parliamentarians enough that the royalist infantry caught up, and by 20 September, battle was imminent!

Essex' forces began early, and managed to gain the high ground that proved so decisive to the battle. Rupert led the main cavalry charge in an attempt to break the parliamentarian ranks, but their stubborn defense proved difficult to overcome. A combination of heavy artillery fire and stubborn resolve caused the royalists to over-commit, resulting in significant losses. The infantry under Lord Byron had used the most part of the royalist gunpowder to no avail, so by midnight when the two armies eventually disengaged, the royalists were in pretty poor shape. Essex expected to re-engage the following day, but Charles' men were in no state, and reluctantly moved north to Oxford, leaving the way clear for Essex to return via Reading to London. 

However...
1643 also saw two very important agreements reached by each side, that would ensure the war would not be concluded any time soon. Firstly, Charles reached a truce with the Catholic rebellion in Ireland, where hostilities were for the time being suspended, and the Irish Catholic Confederation formed as a government in Kilkenny. This truce was interpreted as an ill omen in Parliament, for many thought an Irish alliance with Charles was on the cards - remember, many already thought he was pro-Catholic, so it wasn't entirely impossible to imagine. The fateful words of Lord Strafford uttered to Charles during the Bishops' Wars in Scotland came back to haunt the king, as well - when Charles couldn't raise an army to oppose the Scots in 1639, Strafford had told him there were men in Ireland he could use 'to reduce the kingdom'. He meant, it is now understood, to reduce Scotland, but in the volatile climate of Civil War England, Parliament decided he had meant to reduce England. 

So to guard against such an alliance, Parliament negotiated with Edinburgh a Solemn League and Covenant, which effectively brought Scotland into the war against Charles. In return, the Scottish Presbyterian Church would be adopted as the national church, which was fine with many of the Puritans in Parliament, though remained ambiguous enough in its talk of religious reform that it was agreed to by most MPs. But not all. Some MPs actually left London in protest. Mercurius Aulicus had some choice words to say on the subject, and made the most it could of portraying the cracks that were forming among the leadership in London. 

Next time, we're on our way to Marston Moor, and I'll also be looking at those cracks in some more detail!

A month of civil war! part four

It's part four! We've seen the European background to the conflict, and we've seen both the religious and the political state of the nations of the British isles. But what actually happened during the Civil War in England? What were the Scots - to say nothing of the Irish - up to? Well, let's take a look!

We left Charles last time with his standard raised in Nottingham, on 22 August 1642. What exactly does this mean, though? By raising his banner, he summoned his army to him, which formed a declaration of war. However, he was declaring war on parliament, the elected body of the people of England. This is hugely significant, for it had never really been done before. Previous civil wars within England had been aimed at the king, such as the de Montfort rebellion, or the Wars of the Roses. The English Civil War reflects a breakdown of the political system, but from the top-down, rather than the bottom-up. 

However, it would be wrong to think that 1642 marked a watershed moment, where the people of the country fell into either the King's or Parliament's camp. The vast majority of the country greatly desired to stay neutral. Wars were costly, and nobody really wanted to go fighting each other, except perhaps the King himself. But war was now inevitable. The king's forces had assembled, parliament's troops followed them to 'rescue' the king, as mentioned last time - that would not be effected without military action, of course. 

The road to war: Edgehill
What is perhaps most surprising about the Civil War is that there were only ever three big set-piece pitched battles throughout the entire conflict, beginning with Edgehill on 23 October 1642. Parliament had trooped through the East Midlands, ending in the Cotswolds, strategically placing themselves between the King's base of Oxford and London. Charles perceived his greatest support to lie in the Welsh borderlands, so moved from Nottingham to Shrewsbury, before deciding to march to London. Pausing at Wellington, Charles made the famous declaration to uphold Protestantism, to uphold the law, and to uphold the liberty of parliament. 

The parliamentary army, led by the Earl of Essex, led his army to meet the royalists, and the two forces met at Edgehill in Worcestershire on 23 October. While the armies were assembled in the morning, nothing actually happened until the early afternoon, when the sight of Charles personally encouraging his troops apparently goaded the parliamentarian army into opening fire. The royalist cavalry, led by Prince Rupert and Lord Byron, charged on their guns and caused a whole troop of parliamentary cavalry to retreat from the field. Seeing so much of their cavalry disappear, many of the infantry also fled. However, when the majority of the royalist cavalry didn't return from their initial rout, choosing instead to loot the baggage train, the remaining parliamentarian cavalry were able to ride down the royalist infantry. The centre was in such disarray as a result, the king's standard was captured. Luckily, the royalist cavalry then returned, re-capturing the standard on the way. The light failed, and the battle soon ended as the armies retreated to their respective camps. 

The following day, neither side was too keen to resume, and by that evening Essex was leading the parliamentary force to Warwick Castle, which allowed Charles to resume his march to London. However, a roundabout route that took him via Oxford and Reading, while Essex went directly from Warwick to London, prevented Charles from entering London, and so he retreated to Oxford, which by now he established as the royalist capital. 

Just the beginning...
The armies of the king and of parliament were reasonably well-matched, which really proved to be the cause for the war going on as long as it did. In these early days of the conflict, there was no clear way to say who would prevail. At Edgehill, it has been postulated that Charles should have won, but his undisciplined cavalry, who were too concerned with looting than with prosecuting the war, allowed the parliamentary army to regroup, whereas they could have capitalized on their rout and smashed Essex' forces. Well, that's all a maybe now.

Nobody won Edgehill. The civil war in England continued on, and I'll be looking at more of the conflict soon!

A month of Civil War! part three

Welcome back for part three! Today, as promised, I'll ramble on a bit about the political side of the causes for the Civil War in England, with a look at the events that led up to the battle lines being drawn between the King and his parliament. 

Differing views of religious belief played a large part in the declaration of war, as discussed last time, but perhaps one of the most iconic images of this period is Charles I dissolving parliaments because they disagreed with him. This is certainly one of the enduring ideas that I've taken away from my school days of studying the period. Charles, we were told, wanted money, but parliament refused to grant it to him so he ruled without parliament for most of his reign. When he finally had to call a parliament, they turned on him. Did they?

Charles I - despot?
I have mentioned in previous entries that Charles I was a firm believer in the idea of the Divine Right of Kings, that a King receives his authority to rule from God alone, and therefore his will is comparable with that of the Almighty. This perhaps gives some idea as to the rest of his character. Charles was certainly a proud man, with a definite taste for the finer things in life. He was a big art collector, and commissioned lots of art from Rubens, Van Dyck, et al. All of this cost money, of course, more than the King's personal income.

To get money, the King needed to get a parliament to agree to grant him a portion of the revenue raised from taxes. While James I was used to much less confrontational sessions when he ruled Scotland, he resorted to some creative means of money-raising when on the English throne, for instance selling titles and monopolies. He merely circumvented parliament. Charles, on the other hand, was much too proud for that - he seems to have believed that parliament existed to merely sign off on his decrees. As such, when he was forced to negotiate for settlements with the MPs, in a fit of pique he dissolved parliament on no less than three separate occasions - the last, in 1629, was to be the last parliament called for eleven years. 

This does seem to make him appear a bit of a despot, don't you think? A man who believes parliament is beneath him, and who refused to negotiate with his subjects on the way in which he ran the kingdom. 

Creative accounting
Much like his father, Charles went about sourcing other channels of income. The most famous of these is probably the Ship Tax. Ship Tax was a tax payable by all the people who lived on the coast of Britain, to pay for the upkeep of the navy and harbour defenses in case of foreign invasion. Charles, the little scamp, decided that all those inland dwellers benefited from the harbour defenses and the navy being kept in shape, and so they should also pay the tax. I must admit, I do see the logic of this - a more general-purpose defense tax would be far more sensible than merely taxing those who live on the circumference of the country. This assumes, of course, that the money goes towards the defense of the country...

Other sources of revenue explored during this period were revivals of Forestry laws, where the king claimed ownership of all land that had once been forest (and so could charge for rents etc); knighthood fines, whereby the king reserved the right to re-knight any peer at his coronation, and those who did not attend were forced to pay a fine; forced loans, similar to ship money, where the king forced noblemen to pay a kind of defense tax in case of foreign invasion (real or otherwise); and the selling of wardships of wealthy orphaned children to noblemen. 

Charles could not pass new laws, because he needed parliament for that. Instead, he merely revived laws still on the statute books, so in essence he was doing nothing illegal or wrong. However, when people appealed such things as the knighthood fines, judges did often find against the king, which in turn led to their dismissal - another mark of the tyrant?

This couldn't last, of course, and it was the outbreak of the Bishops' War in Scotland that signalled this for Charles. He simply didn't have the money necessary to raise an army to meet the Covenanters in 1640. 

The Short Parliament
In April 1640 Charles called parliament. Immediately, the MPs began to lodge complaints about the King's conduct for the period of his personal rule, with very little being decided for Charles' own aims. When he demanded money to pay for the army, he was told 'Till the liberties of the House and kingdom were cleared, they knew not whether they had anything to give or no'. Charles' ally the Earl of Strafford successfully caused a rift between the Lords and the Commons before Charles dissolved the parliament after three weeks. Peace was made with the Scots in October, whereby Charles agreed to basically pay the Scots off, then called another parliament that November. 

The Long Parliament
This time, the MPs were ready. Before attempting anything else, they forced Charles to sign into law some key pieces of legislation, with actual threats of violence made if he failed to do so. In addition to signing the death warrant for Strafford, he was made to repeal the Ship Tax, the abolition of the royal prerogative courts (which Charles had used to decide many appeals in his favour during the personal rule), and most importantly, the Triennial Act. This last ensured that a parliament must be called for at least fifty days in any three year period. He was then forced to agree that parliament could only be dissolved by its own agreement, with an Act of Parliament passed to such an effect. Thus began the Long Parliament, which sat until 1648 more or less continuously. 

However, all was not united under this new parliament. Strafford's discord had obviously done the trick, as his trial kept the Houses split and a pro-Charles faction soon emerged. MPs were keen to redress the religious reforms that Charles had implemented with William Laud, who had also been arrested, and the legality of the King's meddling in religious affairs was questioned. However, while many MPs began to move for a removal of Laudian reforms, it didn't take long for appeals to come in requesting the reinstatement of the bishops. 

The situation in Ireland in 1641, with the Catholic uprising bringing news of ghastly atrocities being committed against Protestant English settlers there, caused control of the army to become a major issue in parliament. It was at this time that the Grand Remonstrance was presented to the King by John Pym, who had listed all of Charles' misdeeds over the period of personal rule, and possible solutions to each. Parliament requested the power to appoint commanders in the army and navy. The King refused, and refuted the Grand Remonstrance. When news reached him of a plot to impeach his Catholic wife for her alleged part in a Catholic plot against the country, Charles decided to act. 

In 1642, Charles moved to arrest the five leaders of the Commons who had been most vociferously against him. Forewarned, they did not attend the parliament when Charles burst in, so he left London for Oxford with his royalist followers, and set up the Oxford Parliament. Parliament in Westminster then decreed that all measures it passed did not require the royal assent to be come law, and passed the Militia Ordnance that gave it control over the army. Charles revived the Commission of Array that allowed him to appoint a Commissioner in each county, who would be responsible for raising the local militia into an army. 

Charles went first to Hull, to make use of the arsenal created there during his dealings in Scotland, but was barred entry by the parliamentarian governor. Arguably, the expulsion of the royalists from Hull was the first military action of the English Civil War. Frustrated, Charles moved south to Nottingham and, on 22 August 1642, raised his standard. Parliament had during this time appointed the Earl of Essex as commander of their army, and tasked him with 'rescuing' the King from the 'desperate persons' he was with. 

It was war! 

It's interesting to look back and see where such comparatively small steps eventually led. Charles saw it as his right, as King, to govern his subjects as he saw fit. When he was challenged, he went into a fit of pique and circumstances pushed him into war with his own people. 

There is, to my mind, a definite sense of smugness about parliament once they had secured their own safety with the Triennial Act and the Act against Dissolution - perhaps if they had been more circumspect war would have been avoided. Of course, circumspection is perhaps a tall order to ask from a nation who had been under what they had perceived to be a tyrannical rule for eleven years. 

At any rate, war was inevitable, with the royalist forces gathered in the west midlands, and the parliamentarians moving through the east midlands to meet them (collecting Oliver Cromwell from Cambridgeshire on the way). Come back next time, for a series of snapshot views of the conflict!

A month of Civil War! part two

Welcome back! It's part two of my look at the English Civil War, and I would like to spend today's installment looking into the religious background to the wars in England, Scotland and Ireland - the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. 

Religion and Charles I
In school, I learnt that Charles I was an arrogant and petulant monarch, who demanded more and more money from parliament. When they wouldn't give it to him, he dissolved parliament, who fought him during the Civil War and won, executing the king and setting up the Commonwealth. Oh, and by the way, everyone in parliament was a Puritan, and they banned Christmas and football. 

Such a simplistic view of events is a criminally distorted one, it really is. Let's look at some religious details...

James I was the son of Mary, Queen of Scots, the woman who posed such a threat to Elizabeth I as a focus for Catholic insurgency against the English monarchy. James was brought up far removed from Mary, however, by a Calvinist Protestant group of men, which allowed him to succeed Elizabeth in 1603. James appears to have had a fairly tolerant view of religion, however, aside from the reaction to the Gunpowder Plot. He conducted a pro-Spanish and pro-French foreign policy, Catholic nations both, eventually marrying his son Charles to Henriette Marie, the daughter of the King of France, Henri IV. 

Perhaps because of his wife, Charles I was seen to be extremely well-disposed towards Catholics, a dangerous position to be in when the English Reformation was to some extent still being settled. His choice of Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, perhaps made matters worse. 

Anglicanism stripped away a lot of the ceremony and pomp from the Catholic church, making services much simpler. Instead of the sacrament of the Mass, a Communion was held between the minister and the congregation, taking place around the Communion table, which was placed in the centre of the Chancel rather than against the east wall, as the Altar was in Catholic churches. 

Mass was a huge deal for the Reformers of the sixteenth century. For Catholics, during the Mass the wafer and the wine are transubstantiated into the body and blood of Christ himself by the ordained priest. Luther denied this, preaching that the wafer and wine are consubstantiated to represent the body and blood of Christ, in commemoration of his sacrifice. The difference is subtle but massive. Further reformers, beginning with Zwingli in Zurich, denied this altogether - the wafer and wine are a wafer and wine. Instead, during the Communion it was determined that the congregation entered into a spiritual experience with Christ, but he was not deemed to be 'present' in any physical sense. The sacrament of the Mass caused a great deal of turmoil over the course of the century. 

By the seventeenth century, this was by no means a resolved issue. Many English Protestants wanted further reform in a Lutheran/Calvinist vein, as opposed to the delicate balance Elizabeth I had introduced. However, Archbishop Laud did not prove popular following his investiture. 

Calvinism, Arminianism, and William Laud
As discussed above, Luther offered his own version of the sacrament of the Mass, and Zwingli rejected these ideas in favour of a Communion. The next big reformer to take up these ideas was John Calvin, who developed Zwingli's idea along with that of predestination in a godly society. Briefly, God has decided who is to be saved and who will be damned ahead of time, and no amount of 'good works' will save you. This takes Luther's condemnation of 'good works' a step further. Calvinism rigorously controlled society, much in what we now think of as a Puritan vein, through the consistory courts of a Company of Pastors, who judged society and instilled a sense of religious morality. This caused huge upheaval in Geneva, but eventually Calvin settled the city to become something of a Protestant paradise, especially for French Huguenot refugees from the Wars of Religion. From Geneva, Calvinism spread up the Rhineland to the Spanish Netherlands, where it was built upon by the Humanist scholars and theologians, particularly Jacob Arminius. Perhaps the biggest point of contention between Calvin and Arminius is the idea that man can be saved by having faith in God, and has the free will to choose whether he pursues a life of faith or not. 

All of this is significant, because Charles I and a substantial part of his court were Arminian believers, including his choice of Archbishop, William Laud. However, Calvinism had become fairly widespread under Elizabeth I, and many nobles expected Charles to follow his father in espousing the stricter form of worship. What they didn't expect, however, was Laud's agenda for the Church, one that was backed fully by Charles. 

Following Henry VIII's restructuring of the Church of England, with himself at the top, the episcopal rule through bishops remained in place, as it was in Catholicism. Calvinism, as discussed, ruled the church through the Company of Pastors and the consistory courts, and as such had abolished episcopal rule. Charles, however, was a major supporter of bishops in the Anglican Church. Under his rule, bishops remained in place. Adding to this unpopular ruling, Laud continued to upset the people with a series of reforms of his own. I said earlier that Anglican Communion tables were in the centre of the church, accessible by the congregation in order to partake of Communion. Laud, however, moved the Communion table back against the wall, and railed off the Chancel - the congregation was now expected to approach the table kneeling to receive Communion. This smacked too much of the Catholic idea of the sacrifice and transubstantiation, and outrage ensued. Laud also initiated visitations, which ensured that religious practice remained consistent throughout the land - yet another Catholic idea. 

Consistency was the watchword of the day, however. Charles appears to have desired a greater consistency in his kingdoms. I say kingdoms, because while he was King of England, Scotland and Ireland, the King merely provided the common denominator for the three, as each had its own parliament and could govern independently of the other (except in matters of foreign policy, for instance, which could only be determined by the King). This is where a lot of the tension comes during the seventeenth century, as Westminster could not tell Edinburgh or Dublin what to do. 

Speaking of Dublin...
As part of his break with Rome, Henry VIII had declared himself King of Ireland in 1542 (previously, the King of England had ruled as Lord of Ireland by Papal dispensation). It was always a difficult position to maintain, because of the cultural clashes between the native Irish and the Old English, who had settled in Ireland as part of the Norman Conquest of the country in the twelfth century. Following the break with Rome, a policy of Anglicanisation had been implemented, where any Catholic who rebelled against the Crown had his lands confiscated and sold to Protestant English 'planters', who came over and established model farms for the local Irish to emulate. These 'New English' were often at odds with the Old English because of their respective religions. After the accession of James I in 1603, 'planters' also came from Scotland, establishing communities in the northern, Ulster regions of Ireland. The 'planters' served to unite the Old Irish and the Old English by their common religion, breeding two very distinct religious factions in the land.

By the 1630s, however, something approaching religious toleration had been reached. While the Irish Parliament was primarily Protestant, Charles had agreed to granting them toleration in exchange for higher taxes. However, all Irish legislation had to be approved by the King, and when he had demurred a bit too long, the Irish broke out into revolt. Catholic uprisings against the Protestant 'planters' were brutal, with news coming across the water of horrific massacres throughout Ulster, one of the most heavily-Anglican areas of Ireland. When Civil War broke out in England, the Catholics saw their chance to seize control of Ireland and establish the Irish Catholic Confederation in Kilkenny in 1642.

Meanwhile, up in Scotland
In 1637, Charles initiated a policy in Scotland of Anglicanisation - that is, he insisted on the use of the Book of Common Prayer, a new liturgy for the church to use, and an episcopal rule of the church, to which Scotland was vehemently opposed. This Book is perhaps one of the most fractious and divisive books ever written! The Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh declined, to say the least - a National Covenant was drawn up, renouncing the Book and bishops. Charles, who had been ambivalent at best about his kingdom north of the Tyne, decided he would force the Scots to agree with military action. 

The National Covenant was first espoused by Scotland in 1581, and was based on an earlier Confession of Faith from 1560, which basically outlined the Presbyterian faith. Derivative of Calvinism, it was developed by John Knox, who studied with Calvin in Geneva. Rather than the large system of church consistory courts that Calvinism adopted, Presbyterianism adopted a simple rule of the church through the minister and elders in a council called a presbytery (unrelated to the architectural term used for the East End of a monastic church). As such, it was opposed in theory to the episcopal rule of bishops, hence the ideological clash between the Scots and the Laudian reforms.

The National Covenant reaffirmed the opposition to popish elements of religion, which is how many of Laud's ideas were seen. However, not everyone in Scotland was opposed to Charles, and a clash between royalists and Covenanters that began the First Bishops' War of 1639, became the first engagement in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Charles marched north with a hastily-assembled army, and only narrowly avoided serious military action by agreeing to basically postpone any formal decision on the implementation of religious reform until the matter was heard by the Scottish Parliament. 

The Scottish Parliament then dismissed any idea of reform, and the following year a Scottish army marched into Northumberland and Durham - the Second Bishops' War - but Charles couldn't afford to raise another army. He had managed to rule the country for eleven years without parliament, but in desperation he called a meeting in 1640. However, the MPs refused to deal with the King's issue before they had their own grievances discussed, so Charles dissolved this Short Parliament and marched north again, concluding a second peace treaty at Ripon that basically required him to pay off the Scots. A second parliament was called in order to raise the revenue to make this payment, but things wouldn't go so easily for Charles this time...

So...
I find Charles I to be something of a problem. He seems to have the potential to have been a fine monarch, inspiring some pretty amazing demonstrations of loyalty during his lifetime. But just how far those demonstrations are for loyalty to the man or to the crown is hard to say. His obstinacy, however, would ultimately prove to be his undoing. A fervent belief in the divine right of kings - that is, the monarch is divinely ordained to rule the people of that country - led to some undeniably arrogant displays. Charles is a man very sure of his kingship - in the idea that he must be obeyed, because he is king. 

He also demonstrated some unbelievably unsympathetic behaviour towards his subjects, not least in matters of religion. While the English Reformation had seen few years of sustained conflict when compared with, say, the French Wars of Religion, or the persecutions in the Spanish Netherlands, by the 1630s it was still something of an open wound in the country. After Henry VIII had broken with Rome, Edward VI had instituted some quite ruthless religious reforms, and then Mary I had burnt as many Protestants as she could get her hands on, Elizabeth I proved to be incredibly skillful in achieving a reformation almost through coercion rather than imposition. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had demonstrated that Catholics still moved among the English, however, and the threat of national instability as a result of open religious conflict as was happening on the continent loomed large for many Englishmen. Under Elizabeth I and James I, the ruling elite was Anglican, and a Catholic rebellion was therefore intolerable. And yet Charles was seen to favour Catholics, and to reintroduce Catholic elements to the religious life of the country, by force if need be. 

This sort of reform was bad enough, of course. But Charles' attitude to reform was perhaps the worst part. As king, he expected to be obeyed without question, and when he wasn't, he didn't think to coerce or compromise, he sulked. And herein lies the problem. A refined patron of the arts, capable of inspiring tremendous loyalty, but also a politically shortsighted brat. 

Next time, let's look at the political side of the fence, in the run up to the clash between King and Parliament!

A month of Civil War! part one

Happy New Year everyone! 

While we all recover from the festivities, I'd like to inaugurate a short series of small blogs that I plan to produce throughout the month, discussing the English Civil War (and the wider conflicts of the early half of the seventeenth century). 

It was on 1 January 1649 that Parliament decided to put King Charles I on trial, and by the end of the month they had killed him, so what finer way to commemorate this - and, indeed, to start a new year - than with a look at just what all the fuss was about? What finer way, indeed.

Where to begin?

I realise that, for the majority of my blogs so far, I have made suppositions about prior knowledge, largely because most of what I have covered has in some way featured in the national curriculum for British schools. However, I feel that this curriculum has done a fairly poor job of explaining many aspects of the English Civil War that I feel like I didn't, in fact, study it at all. So let's take a broad look at the whole thing.

The causes of the English Civil War - indeed, of any war - are myriad and difficult to unpick from the tapestry of history, and still cause some debate among historians to this day. Taking a view of the Civil War as a religious conflict, one of the causes can be said to stem from the previous century. The Reformation movement of the 1500s caused a radical shift in the life of continental Europe, and spawned a series of religious wars that were fought in many theatres for about 150 years following Martin Luther getting his hammer out. Possibly the most far-reaching result of his actions, however, was the idea that religious freedom is a right that everyone should have. Of course, that wasn't really his intention, but the idea grew. If Luther could disagree with the Pope and preach his vision of Christianity, why not anyone else? Huldrych Zwingli certainly thought this way. John Calvin, too. The religious reforms of the 1530s and 1540s spread throughout Europe, causing a major crisis in the Holy Roman Empire. Religious persecution was rife, and millions were killed as the sixteenth century wore on. 

The Holy Roman Empire was a collection of principalities, duchies and other nation-states in central Europe, ruled by an Emperor who was elected from among the seven leading princes of the lands comprising the Empire - the Electors. The Emperor had no real jurisdictional rights over those lands - so he could not determine the 'state religion' as such - so he needed his own resources if he were to govern effectively. For most of the sixteenth century religious crisis, the Emperor was Charles I of Spain (who ruled the Empire as Charles V). A fervent Catholic and member of the powerful Habsburg family, his grandfather was the immensely powerful Maximilian I, who had also reigned as Holy Roman Emperor. Charles eventually abdicated in 1556 in favour of his brother Ferdinand I, with his son Philip II ruling his ancestral lands of Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. Philip was of course the ruthless counter-reformation monarch who made it his mission to purge as much of Europe as he could of Protestants. While Ferdinand I was of a similar mindset, his son Maximilian II allowed the Protestant nobles throughout the Empire religious liberty. This official sanction of the religious diversity within the Empire led to considerable strife as the turn of the seventeenth century loomed.

The Thirty Years War
The Thirty Years War looms large over the causes of the English Civil War, and yet its events barely concerned England after 1628. 

In a (large) nutshell, Maximilian II's son Rudolf II died without an heir, having granted religious freedom to the people of Bohemia. His heir, Matthias, was elected Emperor and attempted a conciliatory policy among the Catholics and Protestants of the Empire. However, he was forced to revise this later in his reign, and to accept the much more hard-line Ferdinand II as his successor. As Holy Roman Emperor, Ferdinand II almost immediately set in progress a counter-reformation throughout the Empire that sidelined many Protestant nobles in Bohemia, and in 1618 led them to revolt, starting the war. The Holy Roman Emperor was, traditionally, also crowned as King of Bohemia, but the Bohemians offered the crown to any Protestant ruler who would take it - and the Elector Palatine, Frederick V, accepted. Frederick V had married Elizabeth, the daughter of James I of England (and through whom George I had his claim to the English throne in 1714), but his lands in the Palatine (roughly the Rhineland) were insufficient for him as a resource to govern in Bohemia. Ferdinand allied himself with the Duke of Bavaria, and their joint army defeated the Bohemians, outlawing Protestantism. Simultaneously, Philip III of Spain (Ferdinand's son-in-law) launched an attack on the Palatinate. Frederick fled to Amsterdam, and gave up his electoral title to the Duke of Bavaria. By 1622, there were no Protestant powers left in the Empire to oppose Ferdinand. The Dutch then re-launched their war with Spain following a period of peace, and when Christian IV of Denmark entered the conflict seeking to annexe several important areas in Holstein, a Protestant Union was formed between Denmark, the Dutch, and England. This was crushed in 1629, and Christian removed Denmark from the war. However, Ferdinand's power in the Empire began to be feared by Catholic nobles. 

Then, in a surprise move, Gustavus II Adolphus of Sweden swept through Pomerania and, in a series of conquests, captured a great swathe of the Empire down to Bavaria. As a Lutheran king, this was a massive threat to Ferdinand's rule, but Gustavus was killed at the Battle of Lutzen in 1632. Three years later, with the official expulsion of the Calvinists from the Empire under the Peace of Prague, France entered the war in an effort to prevent Austro-Spanish Habsburg domination within the Empire. Ferdinand II died in 1637, with his son Ferdinand III succeeding him as Emperor. With France in the conflict under the direction of Louis XIII and the shrewd Cardinal Richelieu (of Three Musketeers fame), Ferdinand sought to bring the conflict to a close by granting important concessions to the electors, including the right to determine their own foreign policy. Oh dear. Such a massive concession led to the weakening of the Emperor's power. With the Spanish harassing the French, Richelieu aided the Portuguese in rebelling against Philip IV of Spain, which effectively took Spain out of the war. However, Richelieu died in 1642, and Louis XIII the following year, leaving the infant Louis XIV to the throne. Luckily, Richelieu's successor Cardinal Mazarin was just as devious, and began to draw the war to a close under the military leadership of the Prince of Conde. In 1643, Denmark tried to re-enter the war on Ferdinand's side this time, but the Swedish army, which had been pushed back into northern Germany, cut them off. Conde defeated the Bavarians in 1645, and in 1647 France and Bavaria concluded peace. The following year, the French and Swedish army defeated Ferdinand's Imperial forces at the Battle of Zusmarshausen, and the French defeated the Spanish at Lens. The war came to an end with the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. Under the terms of this peace, Ferdinand held absolute authority only over the Habsburg hereditary lands in Austria and Bohemia, with Protestants in Silesia and Hungary retaining their religious freedom. France emerged in Europe as a major political power. Most importantly, the Imperial princes could not demand confessional conformity from their subjects. Frederick V's son, Charles I Louis, was given the Lower Palatine and an eighth electoral vote was created for him. 

But why is any of this important to the English Civil War? 
Mostly, it provides a sort of preemptive echo of things to come, as regards attitudes to both religion and state. To begin with, for most of the course of the war MPs in England - Protestants, all - implored the king to join the Protestant coalition against the Emperor, as a sort of ideological crusade. The Dutch were primarily responsible for a series of newsbooks that would make it across the waters to England with news of Imperial atrocities committed against Protestants. While James I and Charles I both weren't forthcoming with military aid, even though Frederick V was James' son-in-law and Charles' brother-in-law, they did send money to provision troops abroad. Many noblemen and mercenaries from the British Isles also fought on the continent on one side or another. 

The threat of a Catholic conspiracy was very real at this time, also. Since the pope declared it a religious duty to kill Elizabeth I in 1570, English Protestants felt very vulnerable to a Catholic threat. The Armada in 1588 from Spain served to heighten this, and the 1605 Gunpowder Plot caused widespread panic and anti-Catholic feeling. So when Charles I appeared to favour Catholicism, dissent began to form...

Next, a closer look at the state of religious affairs across the British Isles!