Chapter
V
The Civil War- Part One
And the War of the Three Kingdoms
The two parts of this chapter will take into account the build-up and brewing factors behind the Scottish War against the King and the English War against King Charles. To further complicate matters, we also have the Irish rebellion to consider at this time, as well as the subsequent Irish wars with the Kingdom. To follow on after that, the consequent trial and execution of King Charles for treason. I look at the Cromwellian period, the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth, the English Republic, also known as the Interregnum. I examine the period of 1658, following Cromwell's death, which was succeeded by his son Richard’s ineffective rule.
While all this is going on, the Stuart Dynastic period seems to me one of the most literary productive centuries in British History. John Milton, the greatest English Poet in History (Paradise Lost), Shakespeare, Hobbes (The Leviathan), Robert Boyle, the pioneering scientist, the development of the Microscope, Sir Isaac Newton, and John Locke. The period is also marked by disasters such as the Great Fire of London in 1666 and severe plague outbreaks. Around that time, tea trading began, first introduced by Catherine of Braganza, the Portuguese wife of King Charles II. The Mayflower, in 1620, carried the Pilgrim Fathers to the Americas. The Seventeenth Century was a period that saw the breaking away from religiously sanctioned state intolerance and executions, as well as the end of the Divine Right of Kings, finally ending arbitrary rule and subjecting the Monarch to Man.
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Scotland and the Scots.
The wars started with Scotland against England. What triggered the War was the prayer book that Archbishop Laud tried to introduce to Scotland, a form of religious practice that had already made many in England unhappy. The Scotts saw it as interference in their religion, popery, and the imposition of English rule. Laud had added the words “for thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory, for ever and ever”. The Scotts saw this as ecclesiastical monarchic absolutism. It must be noted that at this time, tensions already existed between the three kingdoms, with grievances festering primarily over alignment and uniformity between the English and Scots. The book served as a wake-up call. King Charles, stubborn as he was, tried to make sure that he, not the people of Scotland, was in charge of the Church of Scotland, The Kirk. He desperately wanted to see the unity of the Kingdoms, not just the unity of the Crown. It was a two-way thing, though. The problem was that the English did not want the Scots to influence affairs in England, and the Scots did not want to disappear into the identity of their richer and more powerful neighbour, and were adamant about putting God first and the Monarch second. As night follows day, that did not go down well with King Charles.
To understand the Scots, one needs to understand Scottish society of the period. Scotland at this time defined itself in terms of religion, more of a confessional State. Also deserving a brief mention, the Scots were ethnically divided between Highlanders, who spoke Gaelic, and Lowlanders, who spoke Anglo-Scottish. Needless to say, they despised each other. The fact is, the Highlanders were Catholic, and the Lowlanders are vehemently Presbyterian, anti-episcopalian, and passionately Godly. They needed a unifying factor and saw it in their religion. The Church of Scotland, the Kirk, was their unifying factor. They shunned Anglican ideas of kneeling at communion, private baptism, and private communion.
Driving home their grievance, efforts were made to oppose a union with England; a small radical party (The Kirk Party) was created within the Scottish God’s chosen church, as was the Godly party (The Puritans) in England. They warned Charles that he could not impose the English prayer book on Scotland. In a quasi-confessional state, the Scots' identity was that Scotland was the chosen nation of God, the true Israel. The crunch came when prayers from the book were recited in public, and riots broke out. In true fashion, the king stood his ground; he was not ready to remove any of the passages.
The Covenant
In 1638, a committee was formed in contention, creating the Solemn Covenant —a binding agreement with God. It was based on a confession of faith and loyalty of purpose. To uphold the true religion of the church and to oppose popery and superstition. It gained huge support at a rapid pace; within a short time, upwards of 300,000 took the oath by signing the Covenant. The Covenant was also a political act, an extraordinary show of defiant unity, a definition of nationhood, and a form of resistance to the rule of Westminster. It was also a guiding principle of the separation of church and state. Loyalty was reserved for the King, to defend the true Protestant Religion, and the Covenant is with God. If the King failed in his role, then the covenant required that he be resisted because he failed to keep faith with God. Charles still failed to act, but it was increasingly clear he was no longer in control of the situation. He had as much power to hold this wave as King Canute holding the tide.
The Covenant itself, embodying Presbyterian solidarity, was not of the state; it is the people’s contract with God. The Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Kirk, expressed this degree of autonomy, which ‘owned’ the covenant. Such an alliance between Church and State did not create rivalry, but it did, to a degree, put pressure on worshippers as to where their primary loyalty should lie, and made it difficult, since the covenant did not spell out authority or hierarchy but directed its followers to obedience and discipline. The State, in its role, was careful not to defy the church in matters of spiritual significance. The Scotts were creating God’s Kingdom, allowing ‘the light of the Gospels to shine’. Their decisiveness would serve as an example for the English Godly party going forward. In resisting the King, the Covenanters have combined religion and political ideology to serve their purpose and show their subservience to God.
The Kir, Church of Scotland
The Drums of War
By now, Charles was convinced that the only way to solve his problems in Scotland was by force of arms. A new war of religion was about to gain pace. Scottish veterans, from the continent, were returning- mercenary fighters from the epic of the Thirty Years' War, able to form a professional army, ready to roll back the Laudian reforms. Exchanges of ideas and cross-border cultural influences between Scotland and England were gaining momentum. An English parliamentarian encouraged the Scots to connect the terror of Catholicism with their own godly agenda. To Charles, the Scots’ opposition seemed like a threat to undermine him. It was victory or death; an all-out war was inevitable. The Scots were out to destroy the monarch and impose a republic. The Covenanters were traitors whose lives must be forfeited.
At the end of March 1639, the King left London at the head of 20,000 men, a motley crew of mostly untrained, unwilling, and underpaid. In the background, his wife, Queen Henrietta, was collecting money from Catholics, an act that further exasperated the English Parliament, raising suspicion that a papist plot lay behind the Scottish war, that Charles was trying to transform the Scottish religion to restore the Catholic Church. People in England felt the king was fighting for the wrong side and that they were damned, fearing that God was deserting the nation. Eventually, the Scots and the English Army met outside Berwick-on-Tweed, Northumberland, a couple of miles south of the Scottish border, where the English quickly realised they were surrounded by a much bigger, tougher, and better-trained army, and wisely retreated. Eventually, both sides signed a truce to what came to be called the first Bishops’ War. Ironically, this was also the time when the Scottish clans divided into Covenanters and Engagers, supporters of the king, and they began fighting each other. In this Bishop’s War, an estimated five hundred men died. Also, Charles lost his personal rule, and he ran out of money.
In England, the war with the Scots over the prayer book looked more like a war between Good and Evil. A widespread atmosphere of fear gripped the nation, with stories and rumours circulating. Stories of searching for papists in Greenwich, Plumstead, against a rumour of fifty men arriving there from France. Stories flew from person to person, lighting up the social network as it went. Things were getting out of control across the kingdoms. By then, the Scottish Army was all over Northumberland and Durham, and the hoped-for English loathing of the Scots did not materialise; instead, they became allies against the common enemy. Charles.
Unbounded obduracy was taking hold. For an alternative, King was to try to raise an Irish Catholic army against the Scots. But Ireland was also being divided along religious lines, between the Irish Presbyterians in Ulster, ‘a bunch of fanatics’ as the king described them, who also stood in the way of Laudian reforms. But that is not all. The year 1641 also saw the Irish Rebellion, led by a rebel army. The Irish demanded the return of confiscated land and the start of the Irish Confederate Wars, which were part of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Thousands of Protestant settlers were expelled or massacred, and Catholics were killed in retaliation.
English Parliament
Charles’s only option now was to recall the English parliament, after twelve years of personal authoritarian rule. This was in an effort to raise money to defeat the unruly Scots. He made up a story that the Scots were urging Catholic France to raise an army against England. Parliament didn’t buy that, citing the fact that there were dangers at home far greater than what the letter purports, so Parliament insisted that Charles must address their list of grievances, including the protection of Protestantism, before they agreed to advance him the money. The Magna Carta was being riven. Radical voices were demanding that the ‘commons’ ancient rights be respected, and to restrain the King’s attempts to diminish them. Typical of Charles’s short fuse, he dissolved parliament.
Unrestrained and still not able to get the money from Parliament to face the Scottish army again, he managed, through donations and gifts from loyalists, to scrape up enough money to gather some 25,000 men, untrained, hungry, cold, undisciplined, and raw. They were mutinous and murderous. On the way, they murdered a pregnant woman in Oxford, and in Rickmansworth and elsewhere, they ransacked churches as they went. The Scots defeated them and, for the first time, Scotland defeated and invaded England all the way to Newcastle. Charles had to recall parliament again later in 1641. By then, radicalism had grown to fever pitch, and some of its members were creating an anti-royalist tinderbox. Working against the typical English political system to right itself, to seek consensus and shun division. Popery, anti-Jesuit conspiracy, and anti-Arminianism, only to see the house divided and the conflict deepen. And so was London dividing.
After the King had packed his bags and abandoned Whitehall, Parliament was free to begin gathering troops, primarily from the East End, and trusted Parliamentarians. A militia committee was established, and regiments were formed, with funds gathered to finance this army. Laudian ministers were silenced, Catholics were being rounded up, and their houses looted. Parliamentarian towns, such as Colchester, were fortified; elsewhere, Catholic priests were hanged and quartered by radicalists and activists. Disorder and vandalism spread throughout the Kingdom, and a holy crusade was taking over the land. Parliament, in its own capacity, put to death some thirty Catholic priests at Tyburn (Marble Arch). The nation had come to define itself in opposition to some of its own citizens. The nation was divided, and so was Parliament, with Parliamentarians opposing the Monarchists. The Civil War was but a short distance away.
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