Chapter V
The Civil War- Part Two
And the War of the Three Kingdoms
King or Parliament
Charles, dicing with death, is committed to war. On August 1642, Charles I, King of England and Scotland, on a windy, rainy, soggy day, raised his Standard on the fields of Nottingham as a show of authority. Charles, a stickler on ceremonials, was only to see that the flag was blown down into the mud. For a religious man, that spelt doom, an ominous sign, but he had now reached a point of no return; he had to draw the sword to save his kingship. To stand up to the traitors and the rebels, as he called those opposing him, and fight for his crown and dignity. In Chester, troops were raised for Parliament, while in Shepton Mallet for the King. England remapped in accordance with loyalties and families alike, according to identity affiliation. And so the first blood was shed at a place called Marshall Elm, Somerset. It was a Royalist Victory, and twenty-seven Parliament men lay dead. There followed an element of taking sides, and there were only two sides, Royalists or Parliamentarians, Protestants against fellow Protestants, and all protestants fearing and fighting those anti-Christ, Catholics suspected of plotting to subvert the church and the state. People were uniting while others were dividing according to the choices before them. So were father, mother, son and daughter, dividing either along religious or alliances.
Nemat, joined the Roundheads
Trouble was brewing from as early as the end of 1641; fear for the Royal family became only too real. On the 7th of January 1642, people in their thousands were crying out ‘Privilege to Parliament’ and stood at their doors with swords in hand in a show of solidarity with Parliament. On the 10th of January, 1642, fearing for his life and the safety of the royal family, Charles fled to Hampton Court. He would not return to London until two weeks after his execution in 1649. In response, to make matters worse, MPs returned to Parliament and changed the locks. In the meantime, Queen Henrietta left her children behind, and a divided England, escaped to the Hague, where she attempted to secure supplies of arms and troops. Such attempts did not go down well with the Parliamentarians, nor with the Protestant Dutch States, who disregarded intentions to promote ruin against fellow Protestant states.
Soon after, news emerged that even the Royal family, living in exile, was divided in their affection, namely his nephews, the German-born Prince Rupert, just thirteen years old, and his brother Maurice, who aligned with the Royalist cause in support of their uncle. While their older brother, Charles Louis, joined the Parliamentarians. In the meantime, the gathering storm was unrelenting. With further fears for his life, King Charles relocated to York to gather support for his troops. Soon after, he faced humiliation when he was refused permission to acquire a large arsenal of weaponry in Hull, and when some of his commanders were refused entry to Manchester by its citizens. While in London, a Parliamentary army of 10,000 volunteers was gathering momentum for wars.
Prince Rupert
Edgehill in Warwickshire marked the first battle of the Civil War. Prince Rupert, King Charles ' nephew, fought with zeal and emerged as the hero of the hour. Going beyond expectations, winning the hearts of the thousands of soldiers who were soon to acquire the derogatory name "Cavaliers," A term borrowed from the Spanish Caballeros. Parliament objected that a foreigner had the intention of drawing the sword on English shores. Rupert’s reply was that the sword was in defence of the true religion (Catholic), and fighting for his uncle’s rights. He was later appointed by his uncle as Captain General of all Royalist forces. Rupert was to prove an exception in battles and a great general. He won battles at Braddock Down in Cornwall, Roundway Down in Wiltshire, and Adwalton Moor in Yorkshire, and the Capture of Bristol won him great praise. Up North, however, Parliaments, for added strength, were forced to open negotiations with the Scots and formed the Anglo-Scottish alliance known as the Solemn League and Covenant, committing the English Parliament to the Church of England, which would be reformed along Scottish Presbyterian lines.
Prince Rupert (1619–1682)
In 1644, a Covenanter army of 21,000 crossed the River Tweed and entered Northumberland. Three days later, partly because of the ongoing plague in London, Charles opened a rival Royalist parliament in Oxford, establishing it as his new capital. About this time, 18,000 soldiers from Ireland were invited to join the Royalist cause, but once on the mainland, they divided along religious lines, with some being Protestants. The Catholics that remained were accused of committing severe atrocities; they beat, strip, and drown Parliamentarians, including women and children. However, it was not one-way; the other side was capable of committing atrocities as well.
Victories and defeats were shifting from one side to the other. Parliamentarian victories at the Battle of Marston Moor outside York were one of the bloodiest when around 45,000 soldiers confronted one another. The Royalists lost control of the North of England, ending Prince Rupert's reputation as an invincible commander. That was the turning point for “his robbing, stealing whoring, and killing the people of God. Such accusations flourished against him; he became a hated figure, later identified as “the only cause of war in this kingdom.” At this point, the English wanted total defeat of the King while the Scots sought a negotiated settlement. The Anglo-Scottish alliance came to an end as priorities and loyalties shifted. Adding insult to further injury, the growing divide meant civil war was also dividing Scotland, while the Covenanters were assisting the English Army, Royalist resurgence was growing in Northern Scotland.
Disagreements between English army commanders were also emerging, chiefly between the 45-year-old MP for Cambridge, the rising military mastermind, Oliver Cromwell. He wanted to capitalise on victories at Marston Moor and Newbury, while the Earl of Manchester was seeking a permanent peace on the presumption that no matter how many times the Royalist army was defeated, King Charles would stay as King. At this stage, Oliver Cromwell’s anti-royalist passion was as yet unrevealed; his determination to do away with royalty was never subdued until that aim was achieved. Peace proposals, however, ensued, but quickly led to deadlock, with the King instructing his negotiators to remind the Parliamentarian delegation that they were rebels and that their end must be damnation, ruin, and infamy. It was feared, however, that the two sides would strip themselves of power and resources to the point that the Catholic Spanish and the French could invade England, leaving the Protestant Dutch in an uncompromising position. Despite their religious zeal and sobriety, which gave them a high moral authority, compromise was becoming an obsolete option. It was a war of who's Truth was truer.
A scene from a day spent at Newbury
With mounting disagreement between the Scotts and English Parliamentarians, the ‘Covenanters' army, mostly composed of Scottish infantry, refused to march south, remaining in place like an occupying force, which generated resentment among English MPs. It confirmed to the English Parliament that it should distrust all foreign forces, as the war was an English affair, and remain exclusive to England.
The New Model Army
Ensuring no foreign members, the English formed a pure nationalist army. The New Model Army, composed mainly of men of Puritan beliefs and paid conscripts independent of Parliament, was obliged to fight anywhere in the country to maintain loyalty to the Republican cause and to safeguard the commonwealth of England under its guardianship. The commander-in-chief during the Civil War was Sir Thomas Fairfax, and Oliver Cromwell served as his Lieutenant-General. In 1649, Cromwell was nominated by Parliament to lead the New Model Army to Ireland to defeat the Royalists. (more on that later).
Model Army (The Roundheads)
Following further failed peace negotiations in Uxbridge, the Battle of Naseby in Northamptonshire was fought in 1645, under the command of the newly appointed Oliver Cromwell. Around 4000 Royalist soldiers were captured together with the King’s political papers and private correspondence. Much of which revealed evidence of Royalist forces supported by foreign powers, namely French and Irish troops, who were offered, in payment, the Shetland and Orkney Islands. More importantly, the King had given his wife Henrietta “the power to promise in my name to whomsoever she wished that I will take away all the penal law against the Roman Catholics in England”. At that point, the Covenanters in Edinburgh assured their English counterparts that the Kingdom of Scotland was resolved to live and die with them.
A Proud Royalist
Royalist defeats were on the increase. In early 1645, the surrender of Bristol by Prince Rupert compounded royalist losses of Devizes, Winchester, Basing House, Berkeley Castle, and Chepstow. Faced with such defeats, Charles started to distrust his nephew, “he is aspiring with Parliament plotting secretly for my ruin”. He ordered that he be arrested and forced to leave England.
In Parliament, attacks on the King were on the increase, accusing him of abandoning his country and refusing to make peace, preferring to encourage foreign catholic powers to invade England and to bathe his hands in the blood of his subjects. Further setbacks for the Royalists, as the south-western towns of Bridgwater, Sherborne, and Bath fell to the Parliamentarians while their forces were closing in on Oxford, Charles’s capital. Left with no alternative, the King escaped from Oxford disguised as a servant in 1647 and managed to sail to Newark to surrender to the Covenanters' Scottish Army, still camping there, but soon headed north to Newcastle. Still refusing to swear the Covenant.
Enactment of battles at Newbury
Thoughts now turned to releasing Charles to London, as Charles was adamant he would not sign the Covenant, but the Scots needed authority over his treatment upon release. The Covenanters insisted that Charles was king of both kingdoms and his person indivisible. He could not be disposed of by any one of the kingdoms, irrespective of location, without the other, but ought to be disposed of by both. The English rejected this idea outright. Insisting that the king’s relation is divisible both in its nature and in its exercise. The King of England and the King of Scotland are one man; they are not one thing, denying the Scots to have a joint interest in the king’s fate. In the end, the English Parliament agreed to pay the Scottish Estates £400,000 (approximately £400 million in today's terms) for their assistance in the war, the surrender of Charles, and the return of the Covenant army to Scotland.
The Trial
Charles was taken to English Army headquarters in Newmarket before being transferred to Hampton Court, where, once more, his nephew Charles Louis presented him with new peace proposals, and once more, Charles refused to accede to any of the demands. And again in the dead of night, ‘slippery’, Charles put on a disguise and made his escape, this time to Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight. Again, he was captured and made a parliamentary prisoner. This time, Parliamentarians presented a shortened list of demands in the renewed approach for peace with the King. Charles was uninterested but instead acceded to Scottish peace proposals and entered into an alliance to invade England. On January 3, 1648, after seven rejections of peace proposals, Parliament passed a vote precluding any further negotiation with the king. With Oliver Cromwell enraged at such news emanating from the Isle of Wight, he declared that such an alliance is aimed at vassalizing us to a foreign nation, nothing short of treason. A second civil war was very much on the cards.
A massive buildup of coalition forces, comprising 10,000 Scottish and Irish soldiers, was joined by another 10,000 English royalists aimed at invading England. Once more, this show of force was defeated soon after crossing the Cumbrian border by a much smaller parliamentary force led by General Oliver Cromwell at the Battle of Preston. At Westminster, in the meantime, disagreements were taking place over whether, yet again, to start another round of peace talks with the king, dubbed the Treaty of Newport. It so happens the King did, on this occasion, accede to many of the demands Parliament was imposing. To outsiders such as the French Court, it was seen as nothing less than a capitulation of Royal Power, ‘his sword is taken from him’. Others in Parliament, led by Oliver Cromwell, viewed Charles as untrustworthy and treacherous, and they further demanded justice for the blood spilt and that exemplary justice be meted out through capital punishment. In opposition to some MPs, the Army rejected the terms of the Treaty of Newport, expelling many members from Parliament, leaving a Rump Parliament to approve the Army’s proposals, thereby providing a clear Parliamentary path to Regicide. England was in the grip of a Coupe D’etat governed by an unconstitutional Rump Parliament.
Oliver Cromwell statue outside Parliament
Despite a chorus of objections from the Continent, Scotland and Parliamentarians, Charles’ trial at Westminster Hall on 20 January on charges of creating cruel and bloody wars, accused him of “being guilty of all the treasons, murders, rapines, rapes, burnings, spoils, desolation, damages to this nation”.
The trial, the court and their respective legal construction and establishment were questioned, and here the subject deserves some mention at length. All very Nitty Gritty stuff, but very interesting.
Placed on trial for treason by the English state, Charles adopted a different course to that chosen by his grandmother, Mary, Queen of Scots, by refusing even to enter a plea of guilty or not-guilty on the grounds that it was as great a sin to withstand lawful authority, as it is to submit to a tyrannical, or any other ways unlawful authority. The Court lacked the essential ‘Trinity’ of Kings, Lords and Commons. The argument centred on whether the court, composed of a section of parliamentarians, was the Rump parliament. That Charles, by the rights of Kings, was also only answerable to God, it also had to deal with the fact of Treason. Treason was an act against the King, but the accused was the King, and the source of that accusation was Parliament. But Parliament at that time was composed only of a few chosen members, the Rump Parliament. In modern terms, the parliament of the willing. A show trial. There was no counterargument, no force from the other perspective. Fear and cowardice due to the threat of retribution could be meted out by an authoritarian state. Any resistance came from Charles himself, who finally had to submit to the established power. Eventually, only 59 members of Parliament signed the death warrant.
On 30 January 1649, the King walked through the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall onto a scaffold outside. To hide his shivering body from the freezing temperatures, just in case he gets mistaken for cowardice, he asked for a blanket. The anointed hereditary Monarch, King Charles, was executed in Public with the cry “I am the martyr of the people”.
The demands of some royalists that "30 January be printed in red letters on every calendar" were never heeded. His body was later buried at St George’s Chapel, Windsor.
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