United Kingdom

The war that began in 1642 was a war within three kingdoms and between three kingdoms. There was a civil war in Ireland that pitted the Catholic majority against the Protestant minority, buttressed by English and Scottish armies. This war festered nastily throughout the 1640s and was settled only by a devastating use of force and terror by Oliver Cromwell in 1649–50 and his successors in 1651–54. Whenever they were in the ascendancy, the Catholic Irish were willing to send armies into England to assist Charles I, on condition that he give them religious freedom and effective control of the political institutions of the Irish kingdom. After the Cromwellian conquest, the English set out to destroy the power and wealth of the Catholic elite—at one point even proposing to transport every native Catholic from 26 of the 32 counties of Ireland into the western region comprising the 5 counties of Connaught and County Clare; in the event, they settled for a confiscation of two-fifths of the land and its redistribution to Protestant Englishmen.

England during the Civil Wars.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

Scotland also was embroiled in civil war, but, at one time or another, all the groups involved demonstrated a willingness to send armies into England. The Anglo-Scottish wars were fought from 1643 to 1646, resumed from 1648 to 1651, and resulted in an English military occupation and complete political subjugation (the incorporation of Scotland into an enhanced English state) that lasted until the Restoration in 1660.

And then there was the English Civil War that began in 1642, a war that neither king, Parliament, nor the country wanted. It was a war that was as dangerous to win as to lose. The parliamentarians could only maintain the fiction that they were fighting to “preserve the safety of the king,” as the commission of their commander, Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, stated. The king’s fiction was that he was opposing a rebellion. Most of the country remained neutral, hoping that differences would be composed and fighting ended.

The first years of war were as halfhearted as these justifications. Parliament held the tactical advantages of controlling the navy and London. While the navy protected the coast from foreign invasion, London provided the funds and manpower for battle. The king held the strategic advantage of knowing that he had to recapture his capital. He relied upon the aristocracy for men and arms. In the first substantial engagement of the war, the Battle of Edgehill (1642), Charles’s cavalry proved superior to Parliament’s, and he followed this first encounter by marching on the capital. At Brentford (1642), on the outskirts of London, the City militia narrowly averted the king’s triumph. For the next two years, however, the war was fought to a desultory standstill.

Almost from the beginning, the members of Parliament were divided over their goals. A war group argued that Charles could not be trusted until he learned the lesson of military defeat. A peace group countered that the longer the war ground on, the less likely Charles would be to compromise. Both of these groups were loose coalitions, and neither of them dominated parliamentary politics. Until his death in 1643, Pym steered a course between them, supporting the Oxford Propositions (1643) for peace as well as creating the administrative machinery to raise and finance armies. The excise, modeled on impositions, and the monthly assessments, modeled on ship money, increased levels of taxation to new heights. The king burdened the communities his forces controlled just as heavily.

In 1643 the war widened. Charles negotiated a cease-fire with the Catholic rebels in Ireland that allowed him to bring Irish troops to England. Parliament negotiated the Solemn League and Covenant (1643) with the Scots, who brought an army to England in return for guarantees of a presbyterian church establishment. Initially Parliament benefited most. A combination of English and Scottish troops defeated royalist forces at the Battle of Marston Moor (1644) and took York. But ultimately religious differences between Scottish Presbyterians and English Independents vitiated the alliance. As the parliamentary commanders bickered, their forces were defeated at Lostwithiel (1644) and Newbury (1644). While another round of peace negotiations began, the unsuccessful Uxbridge Proposals (1645), Parliament recast its military establishment and formed the New Model Army.

Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Marston Moor during the English Civil Wars.Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group/REX/Shutterstock.com