English Civil War
The English Civil War or Great Rebellion was a series of civil wars and political machinations between Royalists and Parliamentarians in the Kingdom of England from 1642 to 1651. Part of the wider 1639 to 1653 Wars of the Three Kingdoms, the struggle consisted of the First English Civil War and the Second English Civil War. The Anglo-Scottish war of 1650 to 1652 is sometimes referred to as the Third English Civil War.
While the conflicts in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland had similarities, each had their own specific issues and objectives. The First English Civil War was fought primarily over the correct balance of power between Parliament and Charles I. It ended in June 1646 with Royalist defeat and the king in custody.
However, victory exposed Parliamentarian divisions over the nature of the political settlement. The vast majority went to war in 1642 to assert Parliament's right to participate in government, not abolish the monarchy, which meant Charles' refusal to make concessions led to a stalemate. Concern over the political influence of radicals within the New Model Army like Oliver Cromwell led to an alliance between moderate Parliamentarians and Royalists, supported by the Covenanter Scots. Royalist defeat in the 1648 Second English Civil War resulted in the execution of Charles I in January 1649, and establishment of the Commonwealth of England.
In 1650, Charles II was crowned King of Scotland, in return for agreeing to create a Presbyterian church in both England and Scotland. The subsequent Anglo-Scottish war ended with Parliamentarian victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651. Both Ireland and Scotland were incorporated into the Commonwealth, and the British Isles became a unitary state. This arrangement ultimately proved both unpopular and unviable in the long term, and was dissolved upon the Stuart Restoration in 1660. The outcome of the civil wars effectively set England and Scotland on course towards a parliamentary monarchy form of government.
Terminology
The term English Civil War appears most often in the singular, but historians often divide the conflict into two or three separate wars. These were not restricted to England alone, as Wales was affected by the same political instabilities. The conflicts also involved wars with Scotland and Ireland and civil wars within them. Some historians have favoured the term The British Civil Wars. From the Restoration to the 19th century, the common phrase for the civil wars was "the rebellion" or "the great rebellion".The wars spanning all four countries are known as the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. In the early 19th century, Walter Scott referred to it as "The Great Civil War". The 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica called the series of conflicts the "Great Rebellion". Some historians, notably Marxists such as Christopher Hill, favoured the term "English Revolution".
Geography
Each side had a geographical stronghold, such that minority elements were silenced or fled. The Royalist areas included the countryside, the Shires, the cathedral cities of York, Chester, Worcester and Oxford, and the less economically developed areas of northern and western England and Wales. Parliament's strengths spanned the industrial centres, ports, and economically advanced regions of southern and eastern England, including the remaining cathedral cities. Historian Lacey Baldwin Smith wrote: "the words populous, rich, and rebellious seemed to go hand in hand".Strategy and tactics
Many officers and veteran soldiers had fought in European wars, notably the Eighty Years' War between the Spanish and the Dutch, which began in 1568, as well as earlier phases of the Thirty Years' War which began in 1618 and concluded in 1648.The war was of unprecedented scale for the English. During the campaign seasons, 120,000 to 150,000 soldiers would be in the field, a higher proportion of the population than were fighting in Germany in the Thirty Years' War.
The main battle tactic came to be known as pike and shot infantry. The two sides would line up opposite one another, with infantry brigades of musketeers in the centre. These carried matchlock muskets, an inaccurate weapon which nevertheless could be lethal at a range of up to 300 yards. Musketeers would assemble three rows deep, the first kneeling, second crouching, and third standing. At times, troops divided into two groups, allowing one to reload while the other fired. Among the musketeers were pike men, carrying pikes of to long, whose main purpose was to protect the musketeers from cavalry charges. Positioned on each side of the infantry were cavalry, with a right wing led by the lieutenant-general and left by the commissary general. Its main aim was to rout the opponents' cavalry, then turn and overpower their infantry.
The Royalist cavaliers' skill and speed on horseback led to many early victories. Prince Rupert, commanding the king's cavalry, used a tactic learned while fighting in the Dutch army, where cavalry would charge at full speed into the opponent's infantry, firing their pistols just before impact.
However, with Oliver Cromwell and the introduction of the more disciplined New Model Army, a group of disciplined pike men would stand its ground, which could have a devastating effect. The Royalist cavalry had a tendency to chase down individual targets after the initial charge, leaving their forces scattered and tired, whereas Cromwell's cavalry was slower but better disciplined. Trained to operate as a single unit, it went on to win many decisive victories.
History
Background
The English Civil War broke out in 1642, less than 40 years after the death of Queen Elizabeth I. Elizabeth had been succeeded by her first cousin twice-removed, King James VI of Scotland, as James I of England, creating the first personal union of the Scottish and English kingdoms. As King of Scots, James had become accustomed to Scotland's weak parliamentary tradition since assuming control of the Scottish government in 1583, so that upon assuming power south of the border, the new King of England was affronted by the constraints the English Parliament attempted to place on him in exchange for money. Consequently, James's personal extravagance, which resulted in him being perennially short of money, meant that he had to resort to extra-parliamentary sources of income. Moreover, increasing inflation during this period meant that even though Parliament was granting the King the same nominal value of subsidy, the income was actually worth less.This extravagance was tempered by James's peaceful disposition, so that by the succession of his son Charles I in 1625 the two kingdoms had both experienced relative peace, internally and in their relations with each other. Charles followed his father's dream in hoping to unite the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland into a single kingdom. Many English Parliamentarians were suspicious of such a move, fearing that such a new kingdom might destroy old English traditions that had bound the English monarchy. Because James had described kings as "little gods on Earth", chosen by God to rule in accordance with the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings, and Charles shared his father's position, the suspicions of the Parliamentarians had some justification.
File:King Charles I after original by van Dyck.jpg|thumb|upright=1.1|Charles I believed in the divine right of kings; painting by Van Dyck
Parliament in an English constitutional framework
At the time, the Parliament of England did not have a large permanent role in the English system of government. Instead, it functioned as a temporary advisory committee and was summoned only if and when the monarch saw fit. Once summoned, a Parliament's continued existence was at the King's pleasure since it was subject to dissolution by him at any time.Yet in spite of this limited role, Parliament had acquired over the centuries de facto powers of enough significance that monarchs could not simply ignore them indefinitely. For a monarch, Parliament's most indispensable power was its ability to raise tax revenues far in excess of all other sources of revenue at the Crown's disposal. By the 17th century, Parliament's tax-raising powers had come to be derived from the fact that the gentry was the only stratum of society with the ability and authority to collect and remit the most meaningful forms of taxation then available at the local level. So, if the king wanted to ensure smooth revenue collection, he needed the gentry's cooperation. For all of the Crown's legal authority, its resources were limited by any modern standard to the extent that if the gentry refused to collect the king's taxes on a national scale, the Crown lacked a practical means of compelling them.
From the thirteenth century, monarchs ordered the election of representatives to sit in the House of Commons, with most voters being the owners of property, although in some potwalloper boroughs every male householder could vote. When assembled along with the House of Lords, these elected representatives formed a Parliament. So the concept of Parliaments allowed representatives of the property-owning class to meet, primarily, at least from the point of view of the monarch, to sanction whatever taxes the monarch wished to collect. In the process, the representatives could debate and enact statutes, or acts. However, Parliament lacked the power to force its will upon the monarch; its only leverage was the threat of withholding the financial means required to implement his plans.
Parliamentary concerns and the Petition of Right
Many concerns were raised over Charles's marriage in 1625 to a Roman Catholic French princess, Henrietta Maria. Parliament refused to assign him the traditional right to collect customs duties for his entire reign, deciding instead to grant it only on a provisional basis and negotiate with him.Charles, meanwhile, decided to send an expeditionary force to relieve the French Huguenots, whom French royal troops held besieged in La Rochelle. Such military support for Protestants on the Continent potentially alleviated concerns about the King's marriage to a Catholic. However, Charles's insistence on giving command of the English force to his unpopular royal favorite George Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham, undermined that support. Unfortunately for Charles and Buckingham, the 1627 relief expedition proved a fiasco, and Parliament, already hostile to Buckingham for his monopoly on royal patronage, opened impeachment proceedings against him. Charles responded by dissolving Parliament. This saved Buckingham but confirmed the impression that Charles wanted to avoid Parliamentary scrutiny of his ministers.
Having dissolved Parliament and unable to raise money without it, the king assembled a new one in 1628. The new Parliament drew up a Petition of Right, which Charles accepted as a concession to obtain his subsidy. The Petition made reference to Magna Carta, but did not grant him the right of tonnage and poundage, which Charles had been collecting without Parliamentary authorization since 1625. Several more active members of the opposition were imprisoned, which caused outrage; one, John Eliot, subsequently died in prison and came to be seen as a martyr for the rights of Parliament.