The English Civil War was not a single conflict.  Historians usually distinguish between two main wars, a hard-fought one between 1642 and 1646, which the King lost, and a much shorter war in 1648, which was essentially a war between the victors.  Other conflicts, including Cromwell's conquests of Scotland and Ireland could be added to the total.

Perhaps the most interesting conflicts of the time were the political struggles among the king's enemies.  Like any set of rebels or revolutionaries, they were united only by what they opposed.  When they gained control of the state, when they were quite free to set the political agenda, many found that they were uncertain what they wanted, while the minority who knew disagreed with
among themselves.

In the context of this course the disagreements are very significant.  In the debates of the 1640s and 1650s, we hear men discussing the central political concerns of modern times (and maybe not just modern times):  issues of order and freedom, tolerance and godliness.

When Charles raised his banner at Nottingham in 1642, Parliament was split.  Out of about 506 members of the Commons, fully 236 chose the King's cause. Only a minority of the House of Lords stuck with the Parliamentary cause. Conflict between an evenly split ruling class.  Many people, MPs, Peers and ordinary folk, were desperate to stay neutral.   In 1642 lots of important men retired to their homes in their counties (which men of the time often referred to as "their countries") and did their best to keep war out of their own neighborhoods.  Even among the hard-core parliamentarians many devoutely hoped the king would come to his senses without much effort on their part.

War came anyway.

It was immediately clear that the king had the capability to fight and that he might possibly win.
Early Royalist victories in September and October 1642 presented Charles with the opportunity to march on London, and if he had, we might never have heard of Oliver Cromwell.  But he hesitated, and set up headquarters in Oxford.

The alarm caused by their first set-backs inspired Parliament to look on the war as a serious business.  John Pym, a Somerset businessman who had been a vocal opponent of the king for years, gets the credit for maintaining parliamentary
unity through his personal eloquence and practical sense, and building a policy that made victory possible.

Raising money was a first necessity for Parliament.  It raised loans, confiscated the property of royalist "delinquents" in areas it controlled, and went on to levy compulsory taxes on landed wealth on a monthly and later a weekly basis. [Roots]  This land
tax differed from Charles's earlier levies by being based on a realistic assessment of the value of land, not an out-of-date one.  Finally Pym got Parliament to bring in a sales tax, called the excise, which was the most lucrative of all their financial expedients.

These taxes worked.  Parliament had the advantage of controlling the wealthier half of the country: London and the
Southeast, where agriculture and trade were both more prosperous than elsewhere.  But Parliamentary taxation was deeply resented.  In the name of liberty, the rebels were imposing heavier governmental burdens than the Stuart kings ever had.  Grassroots resistance to central government  had helped bring on the Civil War, but it would also hamper the parliamentary regime that supposedly stood for the interest of the "country," as opposed to the court.
 
In 1643, despite Parliament's mobilization efforts, the war remained evenly balanced between the two sides.  The stalemate endangered parliamentary unity. Pym pushed through two crucial measures before he died in December.  One was the basic plan for raising and paying a regular, professionalized army that would be more effective than the militias and personal retinues that had been fighting so far.  The second measure was an alliance with the Scottish enemies of the king, whose opposition to his bishops had touched the whole war off.  An agreement called the Solemn League and Covenant committed the Scots to support Parliament in return for an English committment to follow the Scottish model when they reformed
their own church.

The price for the alliance was high.  Many in England were repelled by presbyterianism.  Some preferred rule by bishops; others were against any kind of clerical predominance.  They had fought Laud's Arminianist bishops, and the Scots presbyters looked like another brand of the same thing.  Those who opposed an enforced orthodoxy, who believed in both a degree of toleration among Protestants and congregational autonomy were called the Independents.

The disagreement between English Prebyterians and Independents in Parliament would become, a little later, a very divisive issue, one that was all the more explosive because Parliament's professionalized army, the New Model Army, was full of Independents -- including its cavalry commander, the increasingly prominent MP named Oliver Cromwell.  Thus Pym, who died early in the war, forged the tools of victory, but also stored up trouble for the future.

The first civil war was essentially won in May of 1646, when Charles, having surrendered a number of setbacks, surrendered himself to the Scottish army operating in the north of England.  He had the desperate (and not completely unrealistic) hope that they might be more forgiving than his English subjects.  Another time he would be right:  but now the Scots arrested him, and eventually [early 1647] sold him to the English for half a million pounds, back pay plus gratuity.

In 1646 and 1647, then, the English parliamentary party faced the tricky problem of putting the country back together.  Most members of the Commons visualized this as a restoration of the king to his rightful place in the state, in Ivan Roots' words, "once [the king] had been brought to a right understanding of the new relationship between subject and sovereign."

Of course, the problem was defining that relationship.  The moderate Presbyterians in Parliament were willing to bend a lot to restore order, but the problem of religion had no easy settlement.  The Solemn League and Covenant bound England to seek a Presbyterian settlement.  This was unacceptable to Charles, who considered episcopacy an essential part of the church.  It was equally unacceptable to the Independents, who were a minority in the Commons but very strong in the army.  Charles played on these divisions and played for time, hoping for capitulation by the moderates or foreign intervention.  Either might restore him his throne.

The desire to preserve something like the post-war status quo was very strong in Parliament, and in the early spring of 1647, the members decided to get rid of the New Model Army.  The plan was this:  Ireland was still in revolt, and colonial interests and the needs of security required the revolt to be put down.  So, select bands from the army were to be sent to Ireland, and the rest disbanded.  The foolish part of this plan was that the soldiers would be sent home without their back pay.  (Of course there was no ready money to pay them.)

The army refused to put up with this.  Their discontent, focussed at first on the matter of pay, soon became political.  They were the ones who had fought and bled, and everything they had fought for seemed to be in danger.  The discontent affected all ranks.  The common soldiers elected men called agitators to press their case with the officers and Parliament, and many of the officers were sympathetic.

In May, an attempt by Parliament to order an immediate disbandment backfired.  Instead the regiments rendevoused at Newmarket; at the same time a minor officer named Joyce took control of the King on behalf of the army.  Then the army moved slowly towards London, demanding the expulsion from the Commons of 11 men they considered their enemies.  Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law and a man of independent importance, drafted a statement demanding a new
Parliament be elected.

Cromwell and Ireton actually held the army back from more drastic action, because they preferred some kind of peaceful
settlement to one imposed by force.  But in August, riots and demonstrations in London in favor of the king, the army moved in and took control of the city.

Now the army (with its Independent allies in Parliament) was effectively in charge, but it was still split about what to do next.  The chief commanders, the so-called grandees like Cromwell and Ireton, were willing to take a strong line with Parliament, but they hesitated to sacrifice what little legitimacy their government still had by dissolving it.

Some of the lesser officers and common soldiers were affected by the ideas of the Leveller party, which saw
their victory in the Civil War as mandate for ending all privilege in the ingdom.  The least radical wanted a new parliament with fair distribution of seats, by population or tax assessment and a wider franchise.  Others wanted the vote for every adult man.
There were religious issues as well; the degree of tolerance for various Protestant sects being chief among them.

In the end, Ireton and Cromwell, prevented the radicals from setting army policy by breaking up the debate and sending the enlisted delegates back to their regiments, then by crushing an attempt at mutiny.

In the meantime, Charles had escaped from Army custody and was being held on more neutral ground. He had managed to come to an agreement with Scots representatives to restore him.

In the spring of 1648, there were royalist risings in various parts of England and a Scottish invasion.  Some of the MPs supported this rising.  The New Model Army moved decisively, though, and the Second Civil War was soon over.

But a political settlement was no closer.  The majority of MPs, running scared of radicalism, were now willing to do almost anything the king asked.  Charles, knowing their weakness, refused to discuss the abandonment of episcopacy.  When, in December, Parliament voted to continue discussions with the King on this basis, the army grandees lost all
patience.   When the MPs returned to the house the next day, December 6, 1648, a Colonel named Pride was standing at the door with a list in his hand of men who were not to be admitted.  Pride had 143 of the active 212 MPs excluded, and 41 arrested.  Twenty more refused to take their seats under such conditions.  The Long Parliament, 500-some strong in 1640, was
now reduced to a Rump Parliament of 58.

The Independents, with Cromwell as their chief (remember that he was an MP as well as a general), now controlled Parliament.  The Rump, as it is called, now took the most radical step it ever took.  In late December they set up a committee to set up a treason trial for the King.  Charles played along with this.  He seemed to have decided to end his days as a martyr,
and refused to enter into any more negotiations.   The dramatic trial began on January 20, 1649.  Charles was charged with high treason "and other high crimes against the realm of England."  He refused to plead one way or the other, because "a king cannot be tried by any superior jurisdiction on earth." 

He had a point.  To this time, treason had been a crime against the king; now he was being tried for betraying the
state and people of England.  He did not see it that way, of course.  He believed his judges were simply a band of rebels who had seized power, while he represented the traditional liberties and order of the English Constitution.

The court found him guilty, and he was executed on January 30.

The execution was a shock.  Many welcomed it at the time.  Charles had been an obstacle to civil peace for his entire reign, and never more troublesome than when he was in captivity.  Those who believed in the rightness of the parliamentary cause now felt free to build a new future.  They had shaken off an ancient taboo and now could get to work.

Or could they?  Although the Rumpers began by abolishing the abolishing the House of Lords and the kingship, their revolution did not go very far.  Although they had disliked Charles and his ways, even steadfast enemies of the king generally did not want society any more shook up than it had been already.  The Levellers, who opposed legal inequality, and the Diggers, who opposed all inequality, were even greater threats than the king had been, threats to order, property, and true and seemly religion.

The Republican governments of England did little to build a new society on a new foundation.  Eventually Cromwell would dismiss the Long Parliament and approve various constitutional experiments.  But even he felt that the natural rulers of the country, men like him, should keep the upper hand.

As a peaceful settlement eluded them, many of the disenchanted would look back "and wonder what went wrong, and see in the killing of a King the source of all their woes." [Roots].  Then a royal restoration would begin to look like the answer to those problems.

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.