Introduction

Between 1637 and 1660 the British Isles were embroiled in a series of wars, rebellions and revolutions that affected not only all the political and social institutions within them, but all of the people living there. When a large number of the people in Scotland rejected King Charles I’s religious policy, they set in motion a series of rebellions that resonated throughout England, Wales and Ireland and challenged the rule of the king. Radical changes in the political relationships within the four nations sparked a series of wars that brought far-reaching political revolution. By spring 1649 the king had been executed, the monarchy abolished in England and Wales, and a republic established. The 1650s saw Scotland and Ireland incorporated into the republic as the wars finally ended. The republic had a brief life – by 1660 it was ended and the monarchy restored, the united nation established in 1653 was again broken into its component parts, and the old institutions seemingly returned to pre-eminence.

Whilst the wars appeared to begin because of a religious dispute, the questions asked about the king’s government ranged beyond his ambitions for a unified form of worship within his kingdoms. Debate over the nature of the relationships between the king and his three Parliaments evolved into major quarrels that prompted political revolutions in Scotland and England in 1638–40 and a rebellion in Ireland in 1641. In turn these developments prompted deeper questioning of political representation and the social structure. The wars that subsequently developed across the British Isles were fought on a range of issues that stretched beyond initial divisions and included religious, political, and racial conflicts that varied from country to country and region to region.

In 1637 the British Isles comprised four nations – England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. All except Wales had autonomous or at least quasi-autonomous political institutions, although they shared a monarch: Charles I. Wales had been incorporated into the realm of England by ‘acts of union’ passed in the 1530s and 1540s.

The state religion in all four nations was Protestantism, but it varied in nature. In Scotland the Church was Presbyterian, created during the absence from the country of the heir to the throne, Mary Stuart (1542–1561), and further developed independently of her during her reign (1561–1567). The kirk’s hierarchy took the form of a pyramid with the parish at the base, the presbytery at the local level, the synod at the regional level, and the General Assembly at the apex. This kirk had been intended from the 1570s onward to be independent of the political state, but interference from King James VI prevented this aim from being fulfilled. King James had ensured the continuance of bishops within the Church. This allowed for his personal involvement in the direction of the Church through his appointment of bishops.

In England, Henry VIII had initiated the break from Rome during the 1530s and the Church became thoroughly Protestant during the later years of his reign and that of Edward VI (1547–1553). Despite the brief reintroduction of Catholicism during the reign of Mary I (1553–1558), England had been Protestant for about a century by 1637. England’s Protestant Church had retained much of the structure of the Catholic Church, including a hierarchy of bishops and two archbishops appointed by the reigning monarch. In turn the bishops controlled appointments to parishes and symbolised the relationship between the head of state and the Church. England exported its Reformation Church to Wales as a part of the ‘acts of union,’ which bound the states together. England also imposed its brand of Protestantism on Ireland during the colonisation process of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Alongside this apparent unity of faiths was a series of other interpretations of God’s relationship with his people.

In Scotland there remained a significant number of Roman Catholics, particularly in the Highland regions of central, northern, and western Scotland. In some ways religious differences were tied closely to wider cultural differences between Highland and Lowland societies including societal structures, dress, farming technique, and language.

In England too, there were Roman Catholics but these were a small minority in every region, although in upland regions and some northern counties their numbers were higher. The same was true of Wales, where the poverty of Church livings had made it difficult to fill parish churches with Protestant ministers. England and Wales also had other groups of people who did not approve of the form of the State Church. They referred to themselves as the Godly, particularly when being persecuted; contemporaries and historians tend to think of them as Puritans. Most Puritans, especially before the accession of Charles I in 1625, were encompassed within the Church and saw change coming from within. However, there were groups that were essentially separatists and they established illegal congregations or gatherings in England and Wales especially after 1625.

Ireland’s Protestant Church never won the hearts and minds of the people and even as late as 1637 most of its members were incomers, Protestant settlers who had made Ireland their home since the sixteenth century. The lack of strict episcopal control had resulted in the parishes having ministers of a Puritan disposition and even, in Ulster, Presbyterian Scots in some parishes. Moreover, the Catholic Church had strengthened its (illegal) presence in Ireland during the seventeenth century and by 1637 had bishops in place and was represented by a priest in almost every parish.

Charles I’s accession to the throne in 1625 brought with it a series of political and religious conflicts. Charles, like his father James VI of Scotland who had become James I of England, Wales, and Ireland in 1603, believed in the Divine Right of Kings, that at its most extreme placed the monarch at the centre of the political world, responsible only to God. Unlike his father, Charles did not recognise that politics, even if inspired directly by God, was the art of the possible. James had trodden carefully in politics and religion; he was a participator who took a place in discussion and in debate sought to influence decision by argument. Charles was not a participator and sought to impose his decisions on his governments. Naturally this caused problems because it affected the new king’s relations with his Parliaments in England (that also represented Wales), Scotland, and Ireland. It also brought to the fore religious issues, as the king was determined to reorder the Church in the four nations by strengthening the episcopate. The king probably wanted identical systems of worship in each of the four nations and thereby sought to eradicate the individual nature of each of the churches.

Charles, with the support of his favourite, the duke of Buckingham, and through the work of agents like William Laud, who became Bishop of London in 1627, began to reform the nature of the Church in England and Wales. Hitherto, the Church had been largely Calvinist in nature, if not officially so. This had entailed the primacy of the pulpit from that God’s word was interpreted for the people. It had also involved the belief in double predestination that divided the living and the dead into two groups, the elect and the reprobate. This division had been made before the Creation: the elect would be resurrected into eternal life at the end of the world, the reprobate were damned for eternity. No action and no amount of godly behaviour affected this selection. The seven sacraments, the rites of passage to heaven for the Catholic Church, had no such meaning in a Calvinist Church. Only a few were kept: baptism, for instance, marked a person’s membership in Christ’s Church on earth, and communion was a commemorative and communal act, remembering the sacrifice of Christ (on behalf only of the elect), that brought the community together in that remembrance.

Charles rejected much of this. He wanted a faith in that receipt of sacraments together with a godly life ensured a soul’s passage to heaven. This entailed a decline in the importance of the Word and thus the pulpit. This was matched by the reinstatement of the altar. Altars had previously been removed from churches when the sacraments declined in importance. Instead of being railed-off in a sanctified position at the east end of a church, altars had become communion tables set in ‘convenient’ places. Often they had been placed in the centre of a church so that the congregation could gather around them at communion. Charles ended this practice. Communion tables were dragged back to the east end, draped in cloths and adorned with gilt chalices and candlesticks. The people were once again kept from them by rails. To many onlookers, this was worrisome because it looked like the Roman Catholic faith.

Furthermore, the king insisted that reinvigorated church courts ensured that ministers and congregations adhered to his instructions, and that all individuality within English and Welsh parishes was to be eradicated. These instructions were also sent out to the Church of Ireland, where the necessary machinery to enforce these rules was created by Deputy Lieutenant Thomas Wentworth and Bishop John Bramhall. The effect was to drive the Puritan-minded and the Scottish Presbyterian ministers out of the Church of Ireland. Charles’s attempt to reform the kirk in Scotland had even more far-reaching consequences, that shall be referred to.

Politics during the reign of Charles I rapidly became problematic. The government of all four nations was essentially in the hands of an executive centred on the king over that no other body had control and in that no other body wielded much influence. The executive in each state was the council or Privy Council. Each of these – there were three – comprised the monarch’s nominees. The Privy Council in Westminster, which governed England and Wales, worked with the king sometimes in attendance. The councils in Ireland and Scotland worked in his absence, with the monarch’s place filled by a commissioner in Scotland and the lord deputy in Ireland. There was a Parliament in each of the three states: the one at Westminster consisted of an elected House of Commons and a hereditary House of Lords, comprised of aristocrats. In Ireland, a similar body existed in Dublin, but it could only debate bills approved previously by the English Privy Council. In Edinburgh the Estates met. This body included representatives of the clergy, the burghs (towns), the aristocracy, and the lairds (gentry) and was dominated by the Lords of the Articles, a form of steering committee that effectively debated and then framed legislation that the Estates voted on.

Before James VI became king of England in 1603, he had been an active member of the Lords of Articles, but his successor did not follow suit. Charles and his father held similar views about the nature of Parliaments, primarily using them as adjuncts to royal rule, called when necessary. Again, Charles and his father differed on practice, with James being subtle and amenable to debate, his son not. The Parliaments in Scotland and Ireland that met during Charles I’s reign gave the impression that they were largely co-operative and complacent. In both cases this was the result of short-term effective management that plastered over some deep political cracks, rather than a true impression.

In Westminster, the good relationship between Charles and Parliament in 1625 soon foundered. The initial relationship had been based on Charles’s and Parliament’s dislike of King James’s foreign policy, and Charles believed that he was manipulating Parliament rather than it being an equal partner with him in the attack on James. Parliament thought differently. When Charles came to the throne, his first Parliament quickly became aware of his real attitude. Fearing that the king was about to launch the country into a costly war, the Parliament tried to limit his financial capabilities, voting him customs duties for a year at a time rather than for life, as was customary. Protracted battles over finance in the late 1620s and constant questioning of the duke of Buckingham’s stewardship of the military resulted in a series of dramatic disasters, added to developing fears over the king’s religious policies. In late 1628 Parliament almost forced the king to recognise, in the Petition of Right, its central role in the levying of taxation, but in March 1629 the king dissolved Parliament, hoping not to have recourse to it again. Subsequently, a group of Members of Parliament (MPs) were arrested and sent to the Tower of London after they had prevented the dissolution for vital minutes by holding the speaker in his chair whilst a resolution opposing the king’s religious policies was passed.

Charles began a process of executive government in England and Wales known as the Personal Rule. Parliaments did meet during the 1630s in Scotland and Ireland. In England and Wales, government was conducted entirely through the Privy Council, which attempted to tighten its grip on local authorities. Part of the impetus for this was the search for government finance. A series of long-abandoned measures were resurrected to bring money to the treasury: fines were raised for encroaching on royal forests, for failing to attend the coronation to be knighted, and so on. In 1635 Ship Money, an extraordinary coastal-defence tax, was collected despite there being no immediate threat to the nation. A year later the tax was extended to all counties regardless of their proximity to the sea, and the money used to rebuild the fleet. The intention was quickly clear: Ship Money became an ordinary tax. In 1637 a court case involving the refusal of John Hampden to pay his levy saw the king challenged over his failure to pursue finance through Parliament. The king’s victory was narrow and many people took this as a moral justification for refusing to pay the levy, and default increased throughout the country. There seems to have been a fragility to the state that required only a catastrophe to fragment it.

REBELLIONS IN FOUR NATIONS

Catastrophe came about in 1637. Charles’s determination to enforce uniformity on his churches led him to strengthen the episcopal element in the kirk. At his much-delayed coronation in Scotland in 1633 he insisted that the Scottish bishops ape the English bishops he had brought with him. Moreover, the Englishmen were given precedence. To follow through this instruction in superiority, the king had his Scottish bishops draft a liturgy, a prayer book modelled on the alien English Book of Common Prayer. On 23 July 1637, this book was ready and was to be read from pulpits across Scotland. At St Giles, Edinburgh, the congregation was furious – to them this was a foreign doctrine at best, it was English at worst, and appeared to be popish. Folding stools were hurled at the dean. Crowds outside hammered on the doors. Across Scotland, ministers were attacked and churches stormed by angry men and women.

Charles’s response was to treat this as an unwarranted rebellion. Even his loyal minister, the earl of Traquair, tried to convince him that the prayer book was a mistake, but to little avail. The Scottish council was packed with Charles’s appointees, men with little personal authority or experience of government, there because Charles expected their elevation to power would ensure loyalty. As a result they had little sway with the wider political world and less with the Scottish people. Even if inexperienced in executive government, many had been wise enough to stay away from St Giles that Sunday, to avoid trouble and being associated with the prayer book.

As riots occurred across Scotland, members of the Council discussed the matter with leading opponents of the prayer book. Charles’s refusal to discuss the matter in any meaningful way drove opponents to present him with a Supplication and Complaint in October 1637, which put the blame on the Scottish bishops. Charles reacted by threatening to arrest the supplicants, and hoped to end criticism by claiming direct responsibility for the prayer book; he believed that they would shy away from attacking the monarch. Instead, by February 1638, a National Covenant had been drafted. This Covenant was a reference to the 1581 Confession of Faith, which bound Scotsmen and women and James VI together in defence of the kirk. The Covenant went further, asserting that the religious changes imposed by James VI and Charles I were illegal because they contravened the basis of the kirk. The National Covenant was first signed at Edinburgh and then circulated throughout Scotland for men and women to sign at their own church doors.

The Covenanters demanded a General Assembly and Charles acceded, expecting his agents to be able to influence the choice of representatives. He even ordered that the General Assembly should meet at Glasgow, that he thought would circumvent opposition. Charles was hopelessly out of touch and his agents were not in control. The General Assembly, which met in November 1638, rejected the prayer book and abolished the office of bishop. The king’s commissioner, the marquis of Hamilton, Traquair’s replacement, failed to influence the assembly, and when he attempted to end the session by storming out he ran into a locked door. Even after Hamilton had managed to leave, the debates continued. Charles’s reaction to his loss of control and influence was to prepare for war against his rebellious subjects.

By May 1639 an English and Welsh army gathered at the border. Elaborate plans for amphibious landings on the Scottish coast were drawn up and Hamilton prepared a fleet. In Ireland, where there was support for the Covenanters amongst the Presbyterian ministers in Ulster, Lord Deputy Wentworth imposed a series of oaths aimed at forcing Scots settlers to abjure the Covenant. At the same time, the marquis of Antrim, chief of the Clan Mac-Donald (known as MacDonnell in Ireland), proposed to take advantage of the situation. He offered to raise a clan army to invade western Scotland where his lost ancestral estates were situated and controlled by the Campbells. The Campbells, although led by the marquis of Argyll, a supporter of the king, were also associated with the Covenant through Argyll’s heir, Lord Lorne. Wentworth suspected Antrim’s motive and rejected the plan, preparing an Irish army instead, with Protestant officers and Catholic soldiers.

The first Bishop’s War in 1639 was short. The amphibious landings were abandoned. Attempts to land at Aberdeen were called off when the earl of Montrose and a Covenanter Army captured the town. At the eastern border on 4 June, a section of the king’s army was defeated in a skirmish near Kelso. This became something of a rout, and in its wake the Covenanters put forward proposals for discussions. That summer a truce, the Pacification of Berwick, was negotiated, but all the while Charles I planned for war.

A new General Assembly of the kirk met in August and confirmed its predecessor’s work. Later that same month the Estates also assembled, and they too confirmed the actions of the General Assembly. The Estates had been effectively controlled by Covenanters who had minimised the role of the king in influencing the selections of members, and steps were taken towards further controlling the business of the sessions. By the beginning of 1640, both the king and the Covenanters were preparing for renewed war.

Charles sought to improve the financial support for his government and war effort. He planned a two-pronged approach. Wentworth summoned a Parliament in Dublin, that he expected to manipulate into voting four subsidies for the king. In April a Parliament would meet at Westminster and was expected to follow suit. In March 1640 the Dublin Parliament met and all went according to plan, but the Westminster Parliament refused to discuss finance unless a series of grievances was addressed. The grievances were bound up with the collection of taxation in the 1630s, religious issues, and the way in that the 1629 Parliament had been closed. When he failed to influence the Parliament at all, Charles dissolved it on 5 May.

Plans for war went forward, but opposition to the king had developed in the wake of the Parliament. Soldiers mustered for the army went on the rampage, destroying altar rails and religious images, and people across the country began to refuse to pay taxation. Support for the Scots was to be found across England, where people who objected to the religious reforms of Archbishop Laud refused to pay for them to be imposed in Scotland. In Ireland, many Scots in Ulster refused Wentworth’s oaths and left the country, leaving tracts of countryside untilled.

The war in the summer of 1640 saw the defeat of the king’s army at the Battle of Newburn and the occupation of northern England by the Covenanter Army. This time peace negotiations were conducted on the Scots’ terms. They demanded freedom for the kirk, but also wanted a Parliament at Westminster to confirm the terms. This gelled with calls within England and Wales for a new Parliament. With an army in occupation for that he was to provide pay, the king had no option but to accede. Parliament met on 3 November and the king’s few supporters were overwhelmed.

Three Parliaments now worked in opposition to the king. The Dublin Parliament had met in the summer and began to unravel the financial arrangements it had put in place in March. It then went on to question the relationship between itself and the lord deputy and even questioned its subordination to the Privy Council in London. Moreover, Irish and Scots politicians presented evidence about Wentworth’s government of Ireland and his planned invasion of Scotland. This was taken up by Westminster and in November Wentworth, now known as the earl of Strafford, was impeached and imprisoned along with Archbishop Laud.

As the Dublin Parliament began to deconstruct the government in Ireland, the Estates began to reduce the power of the king in Scottish government. The Westminster Parliament began to take apart the machinery of government that had sustained the Personal Rule. As well as impeaching Strafford and Laud, Parliament aimed its ire at ministers Lord Finch and Francis Windebank, who both fled to France to escape. Ship Money was abolished and forest fines were banned. Two acts prevented another period of Personal Rule: one established that there should be Parliaments at least every three years; the other made it impossible for Parliament to be dissolved without its own consent. In May 1641, against the background of a plot hatched amongst some of the king’s army officers, Strafford was executed. This effectively settled the issues raised by the Personal Rule, but Parliament presented the king with Ten Propositions demanding a further role in government by having the right to nominate ministers and to have a say in foreign policy.

The king went to Scotland in the summer months of 1641 to ratify the Treaty of London, which had ended the war, and also to ratify the acts passed in the Estates, which diminished his role in Scottish government. The Estates had passed a series of measures that had been the inspiration for the Westminster Parliament’s work during the spring. Charles also harboured hopes of nurturing a royalist party in Scotland that could overthrow the Covenanter government. The earl of Montrose, the Covenanter general, had become disillusioned with the Covenanter cause and had questioned the ambitions of the earl of Argyll (formerly Lord Lorne). By the time Charles went to Edinburgh, however, Montrose was imprisoned. An attempted coup d’état, known as the Incident, was exposed and Charles became implicated in it. With his attempts to overturn the Covenanter government in tatters, the king returned to London. Within days of his arrival news broke of a rebellion in Ireland.

THE IRISH REBELLION

In the wake of the successes at Edinburgh and Westminster, Catholic Irish and long-established English settler families began to press for similar changes at home. Autonomy for the Dublin Parliament was one aim, but others related to religious issues and the tenure rights of the Catholic population. Rights to practice their religion openly was a major demand and the king had tentatively suggested that it might be possible. The Catholic population too had insecure tenure on their estates having never been granted firm property rights because of their religion. These two issues were bound together and known as the Graces.

Given the king’s powerlessness, the Irish felt able to press their cause. Although the Scots had secured the safety of the kirk, however, and the Welsh and English had freed themselves from Laud’s reforms, religious rights for Catholics were not acceptable to the Protestant Parliaments in Edinburgh and Westminster. Frustrated groups began to discuss the possibility of a rising in Ireland, and exiled Irishmen became involved in these discussions. By October the discussions had crystallised into a plan to seize strongholds throughout Ulster and Dublin Castle.

On 22 October rebellion broke out, but although the forts in Ulster were captured by Sir Phelim O’Neill and others, Dublin remained in government hands. By November, rebellion had spread throughout Ireland and the Old English settlers had joined with the Catholic Irish rebels. The government forces managed to hold onto pockets around the Irish coast, but supplies and reinforcements were necessary if there was any possibility of remaining there. In Edinburgh and Westminster the governments began to discuss military and financial plans for reconquering Ireland. Whilst King Charles outwardly discussed these issues with the Westminster Parliament, he also plotted to seize prominent leaders. Charles was assured that there was now a significant group of MPs who supported him rather than his opponents.

In late November, after heated debate, Parliament had passed the Grand Remonstrance. This was a sort of petition that had set out the evils of the 1630s and the remedies that had been applied; finally, the Remonstrance proposed further reforms. No sooner was this passed by the Commons than it was published. This broadcasting of Parliament’s position was disliked by many MPs. Christmastide 1641 was a period of riots in London and Westminster by mobs supporting the aims of the Grand Remonstrance, and in particular the removal of the bishops from the House of Lords in a move similar to the exclusion of bishops from Scottish government. On 5 January Charles marched into Westminster to arrest five leading MPs and Lord Mandeville. This coup d’état, like that in Scotland the previous October, failed (the proposed victims had fled), and it provoked continued rioting that in turn drove the king and his family out of the capital.

Over the next months Charles and Parliament grew further estranged, agreeing only on the need to fund the war against the Irish rebels. The raising of an army to fight in Ireland drove the final wedge between the king and Parliament, however. It was felt that the king, implicated in an army plot and two coup d’états, could not be trusted if given the military command. He suggested he would have to go to Ireland, especially as the rebels there claimed to have the king’s warrant for their rebellion. With the Militia Ordinance, Parliament took away the king’s military powers in March. In April the king responded by trying to seize the arsenal deposited at Hull during the Bishop’s War. He was denied entry into the city. In May Charles began the recreation of obsolete county-based commissions of array to regain control of the Trained Bands. Throughout the summer of 1642 both he and Parliament battled to raise armies, each hoping to overawe the other.

In Ireland the war had taken two turns of fortune. Money and troops had begun arriving in the spring. The marquis of Ormond took command of the English forces and began to make inroads into rebel territory in Leinster province. In eastern Ulster a Scottish army landed and took control of the region in May. As summer drew on, however, attention in England had turned inwards and the supply of resources to Ireland dried up as king and Parliament commandeered the money for their own use. War broke out in England and Wales in August.

WARS AND CIVIL WARS, 1641–1653

War raged in the four nations for the next eleven years: In Ireland there was a constant state of war; in the other three nations war was more sporadic. Each war impinged on the others and all were closely related to the needs of Charles I, who sought to offset failure in one nation with success and resources from at least one of the others.

In England and Wales, the war that broke out in August 1642 began as both sides, royalists and parliamentarians, assembled field armies, first, to try and overawe their enemy, and then, second, to inflict military defeat in one cataclysmic battle. Neither scenario was to be enacted. By October the king had moved from his initial musters in the North Midlands towards London, whilst Parliament’s commander in chief, the earl of Essex, moved westwards from the East Midlands to stop him. Scouting techniques were so underdeveloped that the king got between the earl and London, and then the two armies bumped into each other whilst searching for quarters. On 23 October 1643, the first major battle of the war in England took place at Edgehill. Partly due to the inexperience within the two armies, the battle was drawn and the war had to take on a new complexion.

After the king failed to press his attack on London in mid-November, both sides now began a fight for territory and the resources to maintain a nationwide war. The winter was spent in regional battles as local commanders began to seize castles and towns in that to establish garrisons. By the spring, the king controlled much of the south-west and north-east of England and had a significant presence in both the North and South Midlands. The royalists also held onto the vast majority of Wales. Parliament controlled all major ports, the south-east and the Lancashire and Cheshire area, as well as significant Midland areas of England, and a good proportion of Pembrokeshire in Wales. The king believed himself to be in a strong position within the country and as such did not take the opportunity to negotiate the end of the war, which arose in spring 1643.

Attempts to dislodge the royalists from their strongholds in the north, the south-west, and the South Midlands failed in the summer of 1643. In the southwest, parliamentarian general Sir William Waller, who had met with great success at the end of 1642, was defeated at Rowton Down in July. The earl of Essex’s attempt to capture Oxford was curtailed in June, and that same month the earl of Newcastle defeated the Yorkshire parliamentarians Lord Fairfax and his son, Sir Thomas, and bottled them up in Hull. Both Parliament and the king sought outside help at this point. At first, Scotland remained aloof from the conflict in England and Wales. The Covenanters had offered to act as mediator but the king had rejected their approach. The leading parliamentarian, John Pym, had exploited the Scots’ fear of the Catholic forces in Ireland. He suggested that the king was negotiating with the Irish, and that there might be Irish landings on the Scottish coast as a result of such discussions. He also hinted that if the king, who appeared to have the upper hand in England and Wales, were to win, then he might turn on Scotland.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE WARS

In Ireland, stalemate had developed after the funding from across the Irish Sea had dried up. The English and Scots forces held significant areas of territory in Ulster (in Down and Antrim), around Dublin in Leinster, and around Cork and Youghal in Munster. There were also a few garrisons in Connacht held by the English. The Irish meanwhile had unified their forces and their administration. Provincial armies had been created from the disparate forces and generals appointed. A government was formed with an executive, the Supreme Council, and a legislative, the General Assembly, which consisted of elected representatives of the shires and boroughs. Each county had a council of its own that sent representatives to provincial assemblies. Despite this organisation, resources were few and the Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny was unable to defeat the English or Scottish garrisons and armies.

Negotiations with the English began in 1643, with the aim of getting royal recognition for the Catholic religion and for the property rights of the Catholic peoples. The king’s representative, the earl of Ormond, was unwilling to make major concessions, but by September at least a ceasefire had been arranged. This cessation allowed for the return home of the English forces sent to Ireland in 1642, and these men were co-opted as royalist forces. This in turn enabled Pym to show the Scots that he had been right about the suspected negotiations, and the Scots became convinced of the need to join the Westminster Parliament against the king. In 16 January 1644 the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant, named after the treaty between Edinburgh and Westminster, invaded north-east England. The English and Welsh people under the control of Parliament would fund the invading army and there would be consideration given to the creation of a Presbyterian Church in England and Wales.

Even before the Scots crossed the border, the war had taken a different complexion. In September three royalist armies were weakened by fruitless attempts to capture the prominent parliamentarian strongholds of Hull, Gloucester, and Plymouth. Failure to capture any of them had wasted resources and reduced the numbers of effective soldiers through disease and injury. It took time to assemble the forces necessary to hold back the Scots, and in the end it was fruitless – defeat at the Battle of Selby on 11 April led to the collapse of the royalist hold on the north. The marquis of Newcastle and his once powerful army became bottled up in York. Royalist attempts to encroach on south-east England came to an end in the spring. Yet Parliament’s attempt to capture Oxford again failed and a series of campaigns followed in that both Sir William Waller and the earl of Essex were defeated by the king. Waller’s army had been caught in Oxfordshire and destroyed. Essex had marched off into royalist territory in the far west only to be trapped and defeated at Lostwithiel in Cornwall at the beginning of September. On 2 July, the Northern Army and a rescue force led to its aid by Prince Rupert were defeated at Marston moor near York. With this defeat the royalists lost control of the north.

The king’s victories in the south, and the failure of three combined parliamentarian armies to defeat him in the fall, temporarily offset the loss of the north. It also led to a false confidence that led some royalists to ridicule Parliament’s reorganisation of its war effort and the creation of one field army from the three assembled in the autumn. This New Model Army was created in early 1645, and in June it defeated the king at Naseby and then set about conquering the south-west. Together, it and the Northern Association Army won the war during the summer of 1645. During the ensuing autumn and winter the New Model and local forces ended royalist resistance in the south of England, whilst the Northern Association forces and the Scots cleared the north and North Midlands of major royalist strongholds. In Wales, Welsh parliamentarians cleared the south of the country whilst Lancashire and Cheshire parliamentarians captured central and northern royalist strongholds.

Fighting had broken out in Scotland during 1644. Alasdair MacColla had led a force of Irish and Highland troops from Ireland to the Western Isles in July 1644. The Catholic Confederation hoped that this force would oblige the Scots to withdraw forces from Ulster; the marquis of Ormond, who lent support to the expedition, hoped that the Scots would withdraw forces from England. MacColla, who was of the MacDonald clan, probably hoped for both, but also had an eye for regaining clan land lost to the Campbells. In August 1644 MacColla was joined by the earl of Montrose, by now a fully fledged royalist. Montrose had a commission to raise the loyal Scots against the Covenanter government. Together, the two commanders embarked on a campaign that over the next year saw them defeat all the home armies the Edinburgh government sent against them. At Kilsyth, on 15 August 1645, Montrose defeated the last of these armies and Scotland appeared to be his to command. He summoned the Estates to Glasgow and began to receive tributes from politicians. Ironically, it was to be one of the early aims of the war that was to defeat Montrose. A section of the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant did leave England. On 13 September David Leslie and a section of the Scots Horse caught Montrose’s men at Philliphaugh and destroyed them. The month-old royalist domination of Scotland was over: but guerrilla warfare was to continue in the country until 1647.

In Ireland, the king had sought a treaty not because he was able to accept any of the Confederation’s demands, but because he needed their military help. Ormond, part of the Protestant group that hitherto controlled Ireland’s political world, was unwilling personally to accept the freedom Catholics wanted for their faith. Charles sought to circumvent him by sending the earl of Glamorgan, a Welsh Catholic, to negotiate secretly with the Confederation. Glamorgan’s terms were more acceptable at Kilkenny, but a papal representative, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, arrived just before the terms were agreed. He was wary about the secret nature of the discussions and urged holding out for public acknowledgement. Before he could renegotiate the treaty personally with Glamorgan, a copy of the secret treaty fell into enemy hands. Upon the Westminster Parliament’s horrified publication of the terms, Charles I repudiated them and Ormond arrested Glamorgan.

THE POLITICAL SCENE IN ENGLAND AND WALES

Thus ended any chance the king had of rescue by his Irish subjects and this influenced his decision to surrender to the Scots in May 1646. Charles had not given up the idea of winning. He had surrendered to the Scots because he thought he could drive a wedge between them and their English allies. In the years since the Scots had crossed the border, several political developments had occurred within the parliamentarian cause. Political factions had developed at Westminster with differing war aims. The group named the War Party sought outright military victory to establish a position of strength from that to negotiate with the king. The Peace Party sought negotiation as a primary objective. A sort of middle group balanced between the two, trying to pursue effective aims without adhering to either extreme.

Overlapping these groups were rival religious interests, named Independents – who opposed the establishment of an overweening national Church and favoured independent congregations – and the Presbyterians – who aimed at an English version of the kirk as a national Church to replace the Church of England. The Independents tended to oppose the Scots and their involvement in the war and in the Westminster Council of Divines, which was debating the state of the Church. There were Independents within each of the three groupings, but they were generally outnumbered by Presbyterians. The army contained a significant number of Independents, however, and in 1647 this was to provide significant muscle for the Independents in Parliament.

At the time of the king’s surrender the Presbyterians still dominated Parliament, but Charles knew that if he paid court to the Scots he would provoke the army. He also knew that the Scots were suspicious of the New Model Army and that they believed the English Presbyterians to be weak in their determination to establish a Presbyterian Church in England. Thus, for the next two years, he played one against the other. He refused to come to any hard-and-fast terms, rejecting the Newcastle Propositions sent to him by Westminster. He encouraged the Scots to see the lack of reference to Scottish affairs in terms of a slight, and the tentative establishment of Presbyterianism as a sign of weakness. By January 1647 the Scots were tired of holding Charles and left him to the English.

THE RESHAPING OF THE WARS

In Ireland, the hard-line Catholics had managed by the autumn of 1646 to dominate the Supreme Council. Rinuccini had brought with him arms and money from Europe, and a good portion of this was distributed to the Ulster Army of Owen Roe O’Neill. With this aid O’Neill was able to defeat Robert Monro and the Scots at Benburb on 5 June 1646. The defeat was important because it was the end of the Scots’ field army in Ulster, but it was also a lost opportunity in that O’Neill did not go on to destroy the army’s bases in eastern Ulster. Instead, he and his forces marched south to provide the nuncio with the military might necessary to impose his will on the Supreme Council. A final attempt to come to terms with Ormond in the summer was swept aside and Rinuccini excommunicated the signatories of the treaty. With no chance of anything less than full freedom for the Catholic Church in Ireland, Ormond handed Dublin over to the forces of the Westminster Parliament and went to England.

The rift between the Presbyterians and the Independents worsened during 1647. The advent of a radical political group, the Levellers, provoked a further widening of this gap. Even Parliament refused to consider the radical proposals put forward by the Levellers, who developed close relationships with radical representatives in the New Model Army, combining soldiers’ grievances with calls for a radical political settlement. The Presbyterian-controlled Parliament was intent on disbanding the New Model and conscripting some of its soldiers into an army to be sent to Ireland. Soldiers opposed these moves because they would not receive full arrears of pay and because many of them were volunteers and felt they should not be subject to conscription.

They managed to get the support of the army leadership, and commanders Sir Thomas Fairfax and Oliver Cromwell led them in an advance on London. At first, Parliament made concessions and eleven of the most vociferous Presbyterians, who the army had singled out, left the House of Commons. However, the army was disliked by a significant number of Londoners who rioted, stormed Parliament, and demanded that it resist the New Model. The eleven members returned and Parliament tried to create a counterarmy. All of this determination faded away when Fairfax and the New Model reached the outskirts of the city. In the meantime, soldiers under Cornet Joyce seized the king and in July the army leaders presented him with a treaty, the Heads of the Proposals. At first, Charles let the Scots and English Presbyterians think that he favoured them because of the Proposals’ refusal to privilege Presbyterianism. This encouraged both groups to step up discussions with him. In the end, Charles rejected the Heads.

The Levellers and the army radicals were angry that the leadership had discussed terms with the king at all. Both groups drafted more radical proposals. The Case of the Army Truly Stated and the Levellers’ proposed constitution, The Agreement of the People, were discussed at Putney church with the army leadership in late October and early November. The radical proposals were moderated somewhat before acceptance, but the discussions were halted by the king’s escape from Hampton Court. This threw both Parliament and the army into a panic; a meeting of several regiments at Ware was prohibited and angry scenes developed when some regiments turned up against orders. Presbyterians in Parliament rapidly drafted a series of Four Bills to present to the king and the Scots tried to persuade him to come to terms with them. At the very end of 1647 Charles signed a treaty with the Scots known as the Engagement, which entailed a Scottish army invading England on his behalf. The Westminster Parliament immediately voted to end negotiations with the king.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR AND THE REVOLUTION

During the spring and summer of 1648 a Second Civil War was fought in England and Wales. Localised risings in Kent and Essex and in south and north Wales were defeated by the New Model Army, and in August the Scottish Army was defeated at the Battle of Preston. At the end of this war it was clear that the king was a major problem. Parliament, again under the sway of Presbyterians, reopened discussions with Charles, although more radical people wanted him brought to trial. The king’s intransigence, based on his realistic hopes of forging an alliance with the Confederation of Kilkenny, drove more moderate army commanders such as Henry Ireton and Oliver Cromwell into supporting moves to try the king. Accordingly, on 6 December 1648, Parliament was purged of its Presbyterian membership by Colonel Thomas Pride and Lord Grey. The resulting Independent Commons created a High Court of Justice to try Charles. When the House of Lords objected, the Commons declared itself the supreme political body in the nation. In January 1649 Charles was tried and executed. In March the House of Lords and the monarchy were abolished and England and Wales became a republic and free state.

In Ireland, the alliance Charles had hoped for came about; the unity of purpose between Rinuccini and O’Neill had declined during 1648 and both became isolated. The nuncio’s power in the Supreme Council declined and O’Neill objected to the confederation allying itself to Protestants such as Lord Inchiquin and Ormond. For a good part of 1648, O’Neill had withdrawn from the Confederation and something of a civil war within the Catholic cause had been fought. Even after Charles’s execution and the defeat of the Levellers at Burford had freed the Westminster Parliament from internal troubles, allowing it to contemplate dealing with Ireland, O’Neill delayed long before joining the alliance with Ormond. When he did, it was doubly too late: O’Neill was dying and Oliver Cromwell had landed in Ireland with the New Model Army. After storming Drogheda and Wexford in the autumn, Cromwell began to take control of Munster during the winter. By the spring of 1650 the New Model had captured central Ireland, and in the summer Protestant forces in Ulster defeated the Ulster Army at Scarriffhollis. When Cromwell returned to England in May 1650, the war in Ireland was confined to guerrilla and siege warfare in Connacht.

The hard-line Scots, who had been displaced from power by the those who had supported the Engagement, had returned to power after the defeat of the Engager Army at Preston. They had been helped in their return by the New Model Army under Cromwell. However, the execution of their king a few weeks later had angered the Edinburgh government, led by the Kirk Party. Discussions were opened with the king’s heir, Prince Charles, and by May 1650 Charles sailed from exile in the United Provinces to Scotland. The Scots, led by the marquis of Argyll, were determined to ensure that the prince adhere to the Covenant and had him sign it before offering material help. Even so, the Kirk Party refused to allow any former royalists or Engagers to serve in the army created to take on the New Model Army.

English forces invaded Scotland on Cromwell’s return from Ireland, and on 3 September defeated the Scots at Dunbar. Bad weather, disease and lack of supplies prevented the victory from being completed during the winter, and Cromwell’s own ill health further delayed campaigning in the first half of 1651. In the meantime, the Kirk Party had been split over the issue of creating a new army. Some of the Covenanters were willing to compromise and forge a new force from royalists and Engagers as well as the more spiritually pure. Moreover, Charles, after much delay to prevent his accruing more power, was crowned and he took charge of the new army.

As the New Model Army attempted to break through the defensive lines in east Scotland, the king and his army slipped past them and invaded England. By 15 August the army was at Wigan, but Cromwell was in pursuit. By the end of the month the king’s army was lodged in Worcester and Cromwell was approaching the outskirts of the city. On 3 September the Scots and royalists were defeated and the king forced to flee and begin a long and tortuous flight to France.

THE REPUBLIC OF THE FOUR NATIONS

In the wake of this the wars in Scotland and Ireland were ended and the new republic secured. In 1652 Scotland and Ireland were incorporated into the republic. Neither had any real option. Scots political leaders were offered the choice between incorporation into the republic and participation in a united government established at Westminster or being treated as a conquered nation. Ireland had no political leadership recognised by the conquering forces. Its citizens were divided into categories depending on their relationship with the Confederation of Kilkenny or the alliance with Ormond. Many of the gentry who were not executed, transported to the West Indies, or in exile were uprooted from lands in Leinster, Munster, or Ulster and shipped to smaller estates in Connacht, where they were ringed in by garrisons. Their former possessions were given to colonial settlers, including former soldiers.

The former principality of Wales was treated to special legislation that sought to ensure the propagation of godliness; commissions were established to eject ministers of dubious reputation and put new men in their place. Schools were founded in a further attempt to introduce godliness and civility. Unfortunately, these measures were largely carried out by Englishmen, and many of the officials in charge, even if Welsh, were suspected of malfeasance and profiteering. In England, the Westminster Parliament never sufficiently dealt with army pay and other related issues. It also angered many by its reluctance to set a date for new elections. By April 1653 distrust had reached such a stage that Cromwell led a party of soldiers into Parliament and threw out the MPs. It was the beginning of Cromwell’s time at the centre of the political world.

The republic embarked on a series of experiments designed to find a godly political state. The first attempt was to create an assembly that could decide the form of the future government. A Parliament was therefore created of representatives selected by the Council of State, which had itself been put in place by the army after the expulsion of the Long Parliament in April. This body was known as the Little or the Barebones Parliament; it comprised 140 men chosen from within their communities for their godly and moral tone. Within the Little Parliament there was a vocal contingent of Fifth Monarchists, for whom the business of earthly government could be seen in the short term as preparation for the Fifth Monarchy or the rule of Christ and his saints, which they believed to be imminent.

The Parliament first met on 4 July 1653 and discussed important issues such as the continued payment of tithes to support the Church. It passed legislation on marriage and on imprisonment for debt. It also debated army funding, but its relationship with the army leadership, which had been instrumental in calling it into being, declined quickly. On 12 December a moderate faction of the MPs, frustrated at the failure to deal with major issues, connived to dissolve the Parliament. Just before the dissolution, John Lambert had drafted a constitution, the Instrument of Government, which created the Protectorate. In its finished form the Instrument established a state with a lord protector and a Council of State as the executive, with a regularly called Parliament representing the four nations.

Cromwell as lord protector was given wide-ranging powers, but was expected to work with both the Council and Parliament in consultative government. The relationship between the lord protector and the Parliament, which first met on 3 September 1654, was not a smooth one. Elections returned a contingent of what were to be called Commonwealthmen, who had been opposed to the expulsion of Parliament in April 1653. They defied instructions not to debate the nature of the new constitution. On 12 September the army purged the Parliament of the Commonwealthmen. Even after this, government and Parliament disagreed over religious toleration and taxation policy. When, in the early days of 1655, Parliament turned to discussing the militia, Cromwell dissolved it.

In March 1655 a small royalist uprising led by a former colonel, John Penruddock, broke out in south-west England. Although the uprising itself was supposed to be part of a wider movement orchestrated by the royalist secret organisation, the Sealed Knot, Penruddock’s men were isolated and easily defeated. The uprising provoked the government into imposing a form of military rule on England and Wales, however. In 1656 the two countries were divided into eleven districts, each under the supervision of a major general. The major generals were to oversee the imposition of a Decimation Tax on former royalists designed to finance the militia. Major generals were also to become involved in local government and to have a reforming effect on the traditional bodies still in place within the counties. The major generals participated in quarter-sessions courts and were to oversee elections. In the autumn of 1656 their involvement in elections caused great resentment across the country and their chosen candidates were rejected. This resulted in the election of a Parliament hostile to the major generals and antipathetic to the Protectorate. This second Parliament also disagreed with the government on religious and financial issues. In January 1657 Parliament’s failure to ratify the Decimation Tax resulted in the demise of the major generals.

Renewed discussions on the nature of government led to the creation of a new constitution, framed by a section of the Parliament, and known as the Humble Petition and Advice. The Humble Petition was presented to Cromwell in late February 1657. Initially, this asked that Cromwell take the title of king and be allowed to choose his successor, and the lord protector seemed willing. Opposition from John Lambert and the army led to Cromwell rejecting the title of king, however, but he did accept the right to nominate his successor and a second Upper House of sixty-three members to be added to Parliament. The reformed Parliament continued to meet until June when it went into recess. It met again on 20 January 1658, but this time with members excluded in 1656 restored to it. When sections of the lower house seemed determined to try and seduce the army from its loyalty to the government, Cromwell dissolved it.

The Protectorate, although consisting of a legislature that embraced all four nations, was not seen as a collective of equals from north of the River Tweed or west of the Irish Sea. Scotland was administered almost as a dependency, despite the agreement made in 1652. Much of the judiciary was initially staffed by Englishmen and half the counties had English high sheriffs. Even the kirk had its appointments vetted by Englishmen. This was partly a result of the continued need for a large military presence there, but it belied any notion that Scotland was an equal partner. The Glencairn uprising in the Highlands that began during 1653 had resulted in concerted military action, General George Monck being sent to destroy the rebellion in 1654. By May 1655 it had been ruthlessly repressed at ground level whilst the leadership was treated leniently in order to secure later compliance in the Highlands. Most of the representatives for Scottish constituencies sent to the Little Parliament were English officers, but this had changed by the first Protectorate Parliament. Local government was also returned into Scots’ hands, but candidates at home and at Westminster were subject to the approval of the Council.

In Ireland, since 1652 government was in the hands of a lord deputy as it had been under the monarchy. For five years this was Charles Fleetwood, but from 1657 Cromwell’s son Henry held the post. There was a heavy military presence in place also, and this was felt particularly during the attempts to transport Catholic landholders to the west of the River Shannon. The programme failed to create a pattern of landholding analogous to England, where large estates tended to dominate. There were so many interest groups buying the confiscated land that the country remained one of relatively small landholders. As with Scotland, Ireland’s representatives at Westminster were approved men, in this case vetted by the lord deputy. With regard to the religious aspirations of the people, after the initial persecution of Catholics in the wake of the war, attitudes were relaxed. Fleetwood had planned to complete the conversion of the country with schools and a well-funded ministry, but the financial will in London was lacking. From 1657 priests began to make their way to Ireland to reestablish their clandestine Church. Henry Cromwell concentrated on developing the Church of Ireland and persecuted dissenting Protestants, especially Baptists and Quakers, rather than Catholics.

In accordance with the Humble Petition and Advice, Oliver Cromwell appointed his son Richard as successor. On 3 September 1658 the lord protector died. Oliver Cromwell’s attempt to keep Richard free of the influences of the major competitors on the state had worked on one level: he could be seen as being genuinely above the existing political intrigues. On the other hand, Richard had neither a power base nor a set of allies on which he could depend. The Parliament, that met on 27 January 1659, fell prey to the attacks of the Commonwealthmen, who again questioned the basis of the constitution and the logistics of the expensive armed forces. Nevertheless, with electoral adjustments and some tampering with the membership of the Upper House, the constitution began to work.

The Commonwealthmen effectively killed the Protectorate, for in May 1659 the army, provoked by propaganda distributed by the Commonwealthmen, dissolved the House, expelled Richard from office, and reconvened the Long Parliament. Why the army believed that this Rump Parliament would be any more favourable is in question, but this was a period of great expectations. The Parliament was bombarded with radical petitions. Naturally this also provoked fears in some sections of society and provided wide-ranging support for a shortlived royalist uprising led by George Booth in August. In October 1659 the Rump Parliament was again expelled and government was in the hands of an army-dominated Council of Safety.

The republic was in free fall. General Monck, from his Scottish power base, opposed the expulsion of the Parliament and purged his forces of opponents. Lambert marched the English forces to confront Monck, but the apparent solidarity in England, Wales, and Ireland crumbled. At the very end of December the Long Parliament reassembled, and in January Monck began a march southwards. By 11 February 1660, Monck, who had set out acting as a servant of the Parliament, ordered it to readmit the members who had been expelled in 1648 by Colonel Pride. The enlarged House of Commons dissolved itself on 16 March after establishing elections to a successor.

On 25 April 1660, a Convention Parliament of both Commons and Lords met at Westminster and decided to offer the republic to the exiled Charles Stuart. He responded on May Day with a conciliatory Declaration of Breda, that Parliament accepted. On 26 May 1660, the exiled prince returned to his kingdom and the three monarchies were resurrected. Whilst the king proclaimed a general amnesty for many, formalised as the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion, the regicides who had signed the death warrant for or officiated at the execution of Charles I were not to be spared. Eleven out of the forty-one survivors were executed. The bodies of Henry Ireton, Oliver Cromwell, and John Bradshaw were exhumed and displayed in mock executions.

For eight years the four nations had been forged into a united republic. Even if this was not a union of equals, it had created a political system that overlay all of the three monarchies. The Restoration set the clock back, untangling the revolution of 1648–49 and the union of 1652–53, re-establishing monarchical rule. By 1661 the clock had been put back beyond the revolutions of 1639–42, removing the constitutional changes that had limited the power of Charles I and bolstered Parliament’s place in English, Welsh, and Scottish government.

Some things could not be changed. The collapse of the State Church in 1642 had allowed for the development of many Protestant sects throughout the four nations. Although the Church of England was restored with often vicious vigour, religious pluralism was not eradicated. In Scotland the kirk was disestablished and the Covenanters persecuted, but Presbyterianism could not be destroyed completely. In Ireland, there was a well-established dissenting movement that could not be displaced by the recreation of the Church of Ireland and Presbyterianism remained strong in Ulster. Whilst political power was concentrated ever more strongly in Church of Ireland hands, the majority of the population remained Roman Catholic.

In political terms also, no amount of hard-line, ultra-royalist politics of the sort that categorised Charles II’s second (or cavalier) Parliament could overturn history. The collective memory of the period 1637–60 may have been one of war and disorder. To some people it was also one of excitement, filled with possibilities for radical change. As with the Levellers after 1649, although the physical representation of republicanism had vanished after 1660, the ideas that brought a republic about and that it in turn engendered, did not. In many respects, the Restoration was something of a chimera.