A Brief History of Britain 1485–1660

by Hutton, Ronald

  It must be obvious, then, that Parliament had considerable advantages. None the less, not only did Charles take a long time to lose the war, but for a couple of years he seemed to be winning it. To understand why this was so, it is necessary to consider the advantages that his war effort possessed, and the first of these was that if Parliament could call on Scotland, to some extent he could call on Ireland. This was, it is true, a less considerable asset. For one thing it had no land frontier with England, so that aid from it had to be ferried across a sea guarded by Parliament. For another, it was divided and damaged by its own civil war, resulting from the rebellion of 1641. During the second half of the conflict in England, Charles tried repeatedly to turn the Catholic rebels into his allies, but as most of the British regarded them with loathing after the massacres of 1641, he could never make concessions that would win their help without losing most of his existing supporters. Instead, he made a truce with them and recalled the royal army in Ireland, to balance that sent by the Scots. It was no real match for the Scots, because it was much smaller, supplying about 7,000 infantry to the Covenanters’ 22,000. Moreover, instead of arriving in one hammer blow it had to be shipped over in parties and at intervals to reinforce existing Royalist armies. Half of it was destroyed almost at once in a local battle in Cheshire. Still, the standard of its soldiers was very high and they did bolster the Royalists at several points and provide the core of a new field army.

  Furthermore, Charles used Irish resources with much more spectacular effect to overturn the balance of power in Scotland. The Royalists there were too weak and divided to accomplish anything alone, but eight months after the Scots invaded England, an Irish Catholic, the chief of the Macdonnels, shipped over his clan to attack Scotland. They were superb fighters, who soon found a brilliant general in a disenchanted Covenanter, the Marquis of Montrose, and after a year they had won control of the country. They inflicted terrible damage on the Covenanter regime, killing about 1 per cent of the adult male population of Scotland, ravaging large areas and sacking two cities. They not only prevented the Scottish army in England from receiving reinforcements, but forced much of it to return home. Unfortunately for Charles, their success was too late and too temporary. The Irish arrived in Scotland after the Covenanters had struck their decisive blow in England, and by the time that they fought their way to victory, the Royalists cause in England was already lost. They were then themselves defeated by a Scottish force returning from England, and driven out of the land. Their decisive contribution was to prevent the Scots from achieving the influence in English affairs which their intervention was intended to bring them. The distraction provided by the war in Scotland meant that after the Covenanters rescued Parliament from defeat or compromise, they had to leave it to win the war itself, and to take most of the credit.

  The second advantage of the Royalists was that they attracted the support of much more of the nobility and greater gentry than Parliament: the party which emphasized ceremony and hierarchy, in church and state, simply appealed more to the traditional leaders of society. The Stuart kings had doubled the size of the House of Lords, and while about half of the noble families that survived from Tudor times were Parliamentarian, the newcomers overwhelmingly became Royalist, and gave the king about two-thirds of the peerage. In an age in which land was by far the greatest source of wealth, these people owned more of it than anybody else. The richest sent Charles their spare cash, while the less wealthy donated their family’s gold and silver plate, to be melted down. Land and lineage were also the main sources of prestige, so that great landowners were still respected local leaders, and could use their influence as well as their wealth to recruit soldiers. This asset was sufficient in the short term to offset Parliament’s control of the main mercantile and financial centres.

  In some ways the comparative poverty of much Royalist territory could actually be an advantage, as long as the king had money from somewhere. Poor areas have been good recruiting grounds throughout history, as their people need to join up to make money. No wonder Wales became known as the ‘nursery’ of the king’s infantry, and at the Shropshire village of Myddle twenty boys joined the royal army because they were promised four times the earnings they could make at home. The landowning classes were also the traditional source of army officers, so could provide a better supply of experienced commanders to the king, and the realm’s best horsemen. For the first year of the war, Charles had both more and better cavalry than Parliament, severely limiting its striking power. All these were wasting assets. Parliament’s officers soon learned on the job, and it slowly built up its cavalry arm, while in the long term the financial system of London and the agricultural riches of the south-east were a more durable means of raising money than the family wealth of Royalist grandees. Once again, however, the Royalists compensated, this time by ruthlessness, as they taxed and conscripted from their areas with a savagery that Parliament did not need. This tactic had further long-term weaknesses, as it naturally rendered them unpopular, but as long as it provided the materials of war it was effective enough.

  Furthermore, the Royalists responded to their own handicaps by showing more willingness to innovate. Being deprived of the main iron-producing area of the nation, which lay in the Weald of Kent and Sussex, they developed those of the West Midlands and Forest of Dean. Combined with imports, this cracked the problem of supply, so that after 1643 they were never short of weapons or ammunition again. Deprived of command of the sea, they relied on fast privateer ships which could outrun Parliament’s navy, keep open communications with Ireland and the Continent, and prey on merchant vessels. If Parliamentarian ports could jam local trading centres, then Royalist fortresses could cut off trade to those ports in turn. The king’s officers were initially more willing to innovate. Some Royalist towns were rapidly given defences of the latest European type, proof against cannon shot and with bastions for flanking fire. The king’s most charismatic commander was Prince Rupert of the Palatinate, a son of his sister Elizabeth, who arrived from the Thirty Years War with the latest European ideas. He introduced the Swedish tactic of the full-scale cavalry charge, and the technique of mining beneath the defences of a fortress to bring them down; both with devastating effect. One again, all these were wasting assets, as Parliament came to imitate and develop them; but initially they achieved remarkable results.

  Logistical disadvantages, however, simply mean that the side suffering from them cannot afford to make mistakes; if the other side makes all the errors, then that party’s superior advantages are thrown away. In this sense it remains true that the Royalists lost the Civil War because they failed to win its biggest battles. There were three of those, at Edgehill, Marston Moor and Naseby, and had Parliament been roundly defeated in any of them then it would probably have had to surrender or make a compromise peace. Edgehill, in October 1642, was the first major engagement. The king’s cavalry wings easily routed their enemies, and had their reserves immediately fallen on the exposed Parliamentarian infantry, then the latter would probably have disintegrated. Instead, the king’s horsemen all made the crucial error of chasing after their fleeing enemies, leaving Parliament’s foot soldiers to inflict serious damage on their Royalist counterparts and produce an indecisive result.

  Marston Moor, in July 1644, was the biggest action of the war, between the Scottish expeditionary force, joined to two Parliamentarian armies, and Prince Rupert’s field army partnered with the northern Royalists. Rupert, finding himself outnumbered, drew up his soldiers in a defensive formation, across difficult ground, to shatter an enemy attack; but all afternoon his opponents made no move. When evening came, he gave the order to stand down, and it was then that the allied army struck. On his left wing Rupert’s preparations were still in place, and the attackers were routed, but the right one was taken by surprise and overwhelmed, leaving the rest of his forces to be outflanked and broken up. Had he not gone off guard, he would probably have won the day. At Naseby in June 1645 Charles’s main f
ield army attacked that of Parliament, charging uphill into a force almost twice its size. On the right wing his horsemen broke through, but on the rest of the field, the superior numbers of the enemy proved irresistible and most of his army was eventually annihilated. His left wing was so weak because two months earlier he had detached 3,000 of his best cavalry, needlessly, to cover the West Country. Had those still been with him at Naseby, they would have given him the crucial extra numbers to break the Parliamentarians on both flanks and hit their infantry from both sides. Again, a single misjudgement had caused a Royalist defeat.

  It seems, therefore, that both Malcolm Wanklyn and Clive Holmes were correct, although the argument here has not exactly been made in their terms. The logistics of war, and the British and Irish context, were crucially important, but so were strategic and tactical decisions. This war, like so many, was both a matter of counting men and money, and one of snap decisions taken by men under stress, on which the fate of a nation turned.

  The Nature of the Civil War

  In the mid-twentieth century the English Civil War was viewed by most experts as the result of long-term changes in society, producing tensions which eventually surfaced to blow up the existing political system. Since then, most specialists have come to place more emphasis on the strains of a triple kingdom, and on the mistakes made by politicians at Westminster in the winter of 1641–2. In this model, a relatively stable society was shattered by explosive drilled into it and then detonated by a few people at the top. None the less, the pre-existing strains within society still matter, because, to follow that geological metaphor, the explosion would break the rock into which it was inserted along natural lines of weakness. Of these fissures, there is no doubt that religion was the most important, and did most to determine the nature of the conflict. It remains a basic truth that Puritans formed the bedrock of Parliament’s local support, while those who wanted to preserve the Church of Elizabeth and James tended to take up arms for the king. Most Catholics remained neutral, but their community still made a contribution to the Royalist war effort out of all proportion to its numbers; partly from ingrained conservatism, and partly because Puritans were its most bitter traditional enemies. Social factors also mattered: as we have seen, many more of the traditional ruling elite were Royalist than Parliamentarian. It is important to emphasize, however, that the issues over which the war was fought were not those of class, but of religion and of the distribution of power between the component parts of Parliament.

  In addition, there were many other local factors. In some counties, such as Cheshire, Lancashire and Leicestershire, power had long been disputed between rival factions of landowners. When the war came, and one of these picked a side, its rivals were likely to choose the other. Big urban corporations such as Chester and Newcastle were dominated by wealthy merchants who had been given trading privileges by the Crown, and therefore tended to support it; conversely, lesser merchants and retailers who wanted to break into these monopolies tended to be Parliamentarian. At York, where the ruling elite was Parliamentarian, it was the interlopers who were Royalist. Where a great local magnate commanded wide respect, such the Earl of Newcastle in the north-east, the Earl of Derby in the north-west, and the Earl of Warwick in Essex, many people would follow his choice. In Wales, western Cornwall and perhaps Cumbria, a language barrier operated which meant that English, or at least standard English, was not the usual means of communication. There the inhabitants were clearly less inclined to view Parliament as the embodiment of the realm, and accordingly supported the king wholesale: by contrast, all other English counties were divided.

  It is important to appreciate that these factors are in practice very difficult to separate out. Rather, they combined to create different local political cultures, which were themselves sometimes riven by debate and division. It is often impossible to tell why an individual supported a particular party, let alone a community. The model of the rock is also inherently flawed, because the explosion at Westminster had the effect of closing traditional fault-lines as well as enlarging them. Herefordshire and Somerset are examples of counties where the traditional rival power blocs were fractured and replaced by the conflict. In Yorkshire, gentry who had avidly persecuted Catholics now took them as comrades because Puritans had suddenly come to seem more dangerous to the monarchy. In the Lonsdale Hundred of Lancashire, landlords and tenants who had long quarrelled over rights and dues became equally devoted Royalists. Local disputes over whether or not traditional festivals and folk customs should be abolished, or over hunting rights and forest law, which had bitterly divided communities, rarely correspond to the wartime polarity.

  Notoriously, the war split families apart: a third of the gentry houses of Somerset suffered this fate, while the Verneys of Buckinghamshire were unlucky enough to be divided father against son and brother against brother. The geological model also fails to take account of the large number of people who changed sides in the course of the war, including many individuals and a few entire garrisons. Nor does it reckon with neutralism. A third to two thirds of the leading gentry of each county seem to have played no discernible part in the conflict, and many of those who did were clearly bullied or cajoled into doing so by others. The zealous partisans on each side reduce to about six to eight individuals in most counties. In the first year of the war, the leaders of twenty-one counties signed local pacts to suspend or prevent hostilities within their borders, so that those who wanted to fight needed to go elsewhere. In every case, however, these agreements eventually collapsed as the warring parties had more need of local resources.

  In many ways the comment of a Frenchman upon his nation’s Wars of Religion applies equally well to the English Civil War: ‘At first we fought like angels, then like men, and finally like devils.’ Parliamentarian generals like Sir William Waller, who could refer to ‘this war without an enemy’ and urge a Royalist counterpart to fight ‘in a way of honour, and without personal hatred’, were replaced by those like the rising cavalry commander, Oliver Cromwell. He could describe the king’s soldiers as ‘God’s enemies’, and rejoice that they were ‘stubble to our swords’. When this war got nasty, it could be very unpleasant indeed. When a small Parliamentarian garrison at Hopton Castle, Shropshire, surrendered to a local Royalist force in early 1644, its common soldiers were slaughtered and buried in a mass grave. In Devon, the king’s local commander had both prisoners of war and people who resisted taxation systematically starved to death in captivity. After destroying the royal army at Naseby, the Parliamentarian troopers turned on its female camp followers, killing over a hundred of them and disfiguring many others. Altogether, perhaps one in five adult males bore arms in the course of the conflict, and perhaps one in twenty died as a result of it. None the less, compared with most European wars of the age, it was still a gentle one. No group of soldiers numbering over twenty was killed in cold blood, there were no wholesale massacres of civilians when towns were stormed, and rape remained, as it was in peacetime, both strictly forbidden and rare in practice.

  The universal civilian experience of the war was to pay for it. Both sides, in their increasing desperation, carried out the long-overdue reform of English war taxation, and imposed demands of a weight and efficiency never known before, the equivalent of raising a Tudor subsidy every few weeks. The assessments used were those drawn up for Ship Money, but at a rate which removed each month a quarter of a propertied person’s pre-war income. In addition, everybody was hit by the excise, a sales tax levied on commodities vended in shops and markets, and many communities had to pay extra amounts to fortify their towns or move convoys through their neighbourhood. Farms could be ruined if their horses were conscripted for military service, on promise of payment that never came, and their other equipment confiscated in lieu of taxes that they could no longer provide. Soldiers whose pay was falling short, and some who were merely criminal, often looted the communities whom they were supposed to protect. All this damage was done before the enemy actuall
y showed up: then towns captured by storm could be plundered bare, and cereal crops burned and livestock slaughtered in raids intended to remove the economic infrastructure of an area held by the enemy. At least a tenth of all provincial townspeople had their homes destroyed, and up to 200 gentry lost theirs; overall, perhaps 2 per cent of the population were left homeless. Many contractors did well out of supplying Parliamentarian armies, but even in Parliament’s quarters many more people suffered than gained by the war. London was best situated to survive it unscathed, and there bakers, brewers, arms dealers and printers all prospered. On the other hand, the city in general plunged into a major recession, and smaller and more exposed urban centres, even those that saw no fighting, must have suffered proportionately worse.

  The war was not the most economically damaging that the English, Welsh and Cornish have ever undergone: both World Wars of the twentieth century far surpass it in that regard. The damage that it inflicted on property is minute compared with that imposed by Hitler’s air force. It was, however, in proportion to population the bloodiest war that the peoples of the realm of England have ever suffered, and the most disruptive, physically and ideologically. There were always, indeed, two civil wars in progress during its duration: that between the contending parties, and that between those who wished to fight it and the bulk of the population, who had never desired it, barely understood it, and only wanted to get through it with the minimum of damage to all that they held dear.