Battles of the English Civil War

Austin Woolrych

• Publisher: Papamoa Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781787206212
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1961, these masterly studies of three major English Civil War clashes at Marston Moor, Naseby and Preston provide detailed background, painstakingly recounted military developments, and pays equal attention to the political and religious concerns of the time."An excellent book...It most skillfully indicates all the essential connections between the Civil War's political, social, and military aspects."—C.V. Wedgwood, Daily Telegraph"Excellent use of eye-witness material."—The Times Educational Supplement

1 — Background to Civil War

THUS A citizen army determined, as another was to do at Valmy just a century and a half later, that a revolution would not succumb to force of arms. But it had been a close enough thing to shock the men at Westminster, who had confidently expected a single short campaign to bring the King to terms. The first round had shown them that if there were to be any sudden victory it would be the King’s. It forced them to consider again what they were fighting for, and whether it was worth a protracted civil war. We too may pause here to see what had brought the two sides to blows, for this was not at all the sort of war in which the fighting men could leave the politics to the professionals. Politics were of its essence; politicians commanded regiments and armies, and soldiers could hardly avoid becoming politicians. It was a war of causes rather than of survival, and to enter in any way into the minds of the men whom we shall meet on its battlefields, we must know what those issues were for which they were ready to risk their lives and inheritances.

The past forty years had pierced with sharp discords that subtle harmony between government and society, ‘court’ and ‘country’, which the Tudors had contrived. It was not the Stuarts’ fault that they inherited a crown impoverished by rising prices in a country which was fast growing richer, and a Parliament which had become the mouthpiece of a powerful and highly articulate governing class. But it was much more their fault that they antagonized this class until by 1640 all but a small court clique within it was bent on curbing the crown’s arbitrary powers. The richer gentry who dominated the House of Commons, and the influential minorities of rich merchants and lawyers who sat with them and shared their interests, were often ill-informed and irresponsible in their opposition during these forty years, and seldom quite disinterested. But the core of their complaint was a passionate protest against incompetence, extravagance and corruption, and against England’s steep decline to insignificance in the counsels of Europe. Protestantism and nationalism had been the twin fires which forged national unity under Elizabeth, and Stuart policy seemed a negation of both.

James I’s weakness for gaudy young men and worthless sycophants had caused the quality of government to slump sharply; ‘he did not chose men for his jobs, but bestowed jobs on his men’.{1} George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, the most flamboyant of the royal favourites, held an even greater sway over Charles I than over James, until he fell to an assassin’s knife in 1628. The Tudor court had offered a career open to the talents, and competition for the glittering rewards of the royal service had helped to keep nobles and gentry in loyalty and discipline. But now the hand that distributed those rewards had grown capricious, and the terms of service less honourable. Entry into the race was becoming hideously expensive, too, with more and more offices being bought and sold at higher and higher prices. This traffic did not profit the King so much as the holders themselves, who regarded their offices as pieces of property from which they could be ejected only for the grossest misconduct. For a decade, Buckingham so ruled the King’s servants that the highest or the meanest appointment could depend on his smile or frown, and his favours were expensive. Moreover in the futile wars of the sixteen-twenties, Buckingham’s incompetence and the general rottenness in the administration led to a series of disasters to English arms which moved the whole nation to anguish and fury. The memory of Elizabeth’s reign, kept alive by the annual bonfires and junketings on her Accession Day, was becoming one of the Stuarts’ biggest liabilities. No wonder that Parliament after Parliament split along the lines of ‘court’ and ‘country’, with the independent gentry of the latter group combining against the whole gang of courtiers and office-holders, and against Buckingham above all. Nor did Buckingham’s death remove the trouble, for the next year’s session rose to such a pitch of opposition that when Charles dissolved this Parliament he resolved never, if he could help it, to call another.

By this time a new quarrel over religion had added fuel to the many old ones over finance and the royal prerogative. Puritanism was not new, of course, but for a generation past it had been more or less safely contained within the bounds of the Church of England. Little sects like that which sent the Pilgrim Fathers over the Atlantic were the exceptions which proved the rule. But when Charles began bestowing the highest places in church and state upon a new school of Anglican divines, dubbed Arminians and led by William Laud, it was not only the Puritans who objected. And the Arminians were not only detested for the altars and vestments and ceremonial which they reintroduced into Anglican worship, or for their anti-Calvinist theology, though to men brought up in the Elizabethan tradition all these things smacked of popery. They also used the pulpit to proclaim that every arbitrary royal command must be obeyed unquestioningly as a religious duty. They took the old and well-accepted belief in the divine right of kings and inflated it into a novel doctrine of royal absolutism. The bishops claimed divine right for their own order, too, and their sacerdotal pomp and pretensions were the harder to bear because many of them were quite humbly born. Anti-clericalism never lay far beneath the surface among the gentry of England. It rose the higher now because Laud was striving to restore to the church some of the material wealth of which it had been plundered since the Reformation, a work which hardly endeared him to landowners who battened on impropriated tithes or leased fat episcopal manors at easy rents.

No Parliament met for eleven years after 1629, and Charles set out to reconcile his people to a royal government that would rule firmly and benevolently, above the clamour of faction. Over most of Europe the tide was set in favour of personal monarchy and against such representative institutions as Parliament. But England would not have it. Once, she had welcomed Tudor autocracy as her saviour from anarchy, and good government had meant strong government; but the Tudor peace had done its work too well. It had also rested, necessarily, on the willing co-operation of lords lieutenant, sheriffs, justices of the peace, town corporations and many other local unpaid officials, and these men, in a sense the real rulers of England, had an almost mystical faith in Parliament and the common law. Charles’s personal rule fell much too far short of its good intentions ever to come near converting them.

Charles had two men of real stature in his service. Viscount Wentworth and Archbishop Laud both sought to inject the gangrened organism of the state with the old Tudor energy, discipline and paternalism, and a strange friendship grew up between the sombre and vehement man of action, scion of a proud Yorkshire house, and the irascible little red-faced cleric whose father had been a draper in Reading. But neither Wentworth’s vision of a noble harmony between the head and members of the body politic, nor the vigour with which he attacked oppression and corruption, impressed contemporaries so much as the ruthless disregard of the letter of the law with which he hounded his opponents or the vast personal fortune he was carving out of the public service. The times no longer condoned the suppression of tyranny by tyranny. As for Laud, his concern for the poor, the unemployed and the exploited was expressed in ways which exasperated the powerful without winning the support of the inarticulate masses. His very presence in the Privy Council, together with two other prelates, was bad enough in anti-clerical eyes; worse still was his use of the Court of Star Chamber to inflict savage punishment on the critics of his order.

Not that these years of personal rule were really dominated by either Wentworth or Laud. Wentworth, whom Charles was slow to trust, was kept far from court, first in York and then in Dublin, while Laud was too much out of tune with his fellow-councillors and courtiers. The King’s counsels were ruled far more by what these two men called ‘the Lady Mora’, signifying delay or hindrance—the spirit of obstruction and procrastination which shelved uncomfortable problems and lived from hand to mouth. It dwelt among the intriguers, the nest-featherers and the ornamental nonentities who made up the common run of the King’s servants; it inhabited the throne itself. Laud himself sadly described Charles as ‘a mild and gracious prince who knew not how to be, or be made, great’. No Stuart ever conceived the responsibilities of kingship more highly than Charles I. Yet this melancholy, thin-blooded, fastidious monarch lacked the essential zest for the exercise of power and the sheer application of business without which autocracy must fail. ‘The duties imposed on him by God he fulfilled with a kind of petulant distaste that struck a chill into those around him.’{2} But he fulfilled them laxly and intermittently. Finer in the grain than either his father or his eldest son, he had the native indolence of both without either the intelligence or the shrewd sense of realities which pulled them up on the brink of deep trouble.

The court was, or should have been, the stage on which the King presented himself to his people, a semi-public spectacle which made Majesty visible and accessible. But since Charles wholly lacked the Tudor flair for courting his people, his court became remote from them, the province of a clique, in whose ears their aspirations and grievances were but a distant murmur. The rift between court and country deepened through mutual ignorance as well as mutual distrust. Charles’s court was not vicious and disorderly as his father’s had been; indeed in its decorous formality and its leadership of taste and fashion there has been nothing like it since. Charles was the last connoisseur King of England, and in the arts at least he was wonderfully served. But the brittle exquisiteness of the court ideal struck no chord in the philistine heart of England, and the flatteries of the court poets merely encouraged him in his fatal penchant for taking his intentions for deeds. Sumptuous and tedious masques, celebrating quite imaginary triumphs of statecraft, hung a curtain of trite allegory and tinsel platitude before the harsh realities of the realm without.

To those outside this stiff world of fantasy and convention it seemed rotten at the centre. The Queen was a papist, surrounded by papists; three of the King’s chief ministers were of the same persuasion, and it was easy (though unjust) to suspect the Arminian divines and even the King himself of leaning the same way. The crowds in the Queen’s chapel, the fashionable conversions, the succession of papal agents at court, the free movement of priests and Jesuits, the virtual suspension of the anti-Catholic laws, all seemed to betoken a monstrous popish plot. Worst of all was Charles’s foreign policy. The beloved Princess Elizabeth, Charles’s sister and mother to Prince Rupert, shared a helpless exile with her husband, the Elector Palatine, while their principality lay occupied by Spanish troops. Yet Charles reverted all through the ‘thirties to his father’s old rapprochement with Spain. Each year the Spanish forces which fought the Protestant Dutch in the Low Countries were paid from bullion which had been landed at Plymouth to evade interception in the Channel, minted in England and shipped at Dover in English vessels. In 1639 similar rights of transit were extended to Spanish troops, to the outrage of both national and religious sentiment.

The court which hatched these policies was not only unpopular, it was extremely expensive. Laden with sinecures, wasteful and inefficient, a labyrinth whose ramifications constantly extended themselves of their own parasitic momentum, the royal household defied a whole series of attempts at reform. In the early ‘thirties it was costing more than forty per cent of the King’s total revenue.{3} And since there was now no Parliament to meet the King’s needs with subsidies, this revenue had to be found by other means. Wherever the letter of the law could be stretched to the King’s financial advantage, the crown lawyers stretched it. Obsolete laws were revived for the sole purpose of subjecting ‘offenders’ to swingeing fines, while the exactions of the hated Court of Wards rose steeply. Merchants and manufacturers found their interests tampered with in a dozen mischievous ways which bled producer and consumer alike. Ship money seemed at first more reputable, until it was extended to the inland counties and levied annually; then it was resisted as a blatant evasion of the principle of parliamentary consent to taxation.

Just how long Charles’s personal rule might have continued is hard to say; the growing refusal to pay ship money from 1637 onwards did not bode well for it. But in that year a flash in Scotland fit the train that led to its destruction. An attempt to impose a Book of Common Prayer on their Kirk goaded the Scots into rebellion, and their National Covenant of 1638 was the oath of a nation to defend its fiercely cherished Presbyterian faith and worship. They swept away not only the Prayer Book but episcopacy itself, and when Charles prepared to meet defiance with force, they raised an army under Alexander Leslie, who drew hundreds of his fellow-veterans from the German wars to his banners. Charles’s raw and half-hearted English troops advanced a few miles beyond the Tweed, met the Scots in battle array, and fled. A peace had to be patched up, leaving the tough and subtle Earl of Argyle, chief of the Covenanting lords, the real master of Scotland. But Charles was not accepting defeat, and now at last—too late—he recalled Wentworth from Ireland to take the helm at home.

Wentworth, now made Earl of Strafford, insisted that a Parliament should be called to pay for the large new army that was being raised. He believed he could manage it as he had managed a very different Parliament in Ireland. But it was John Pym who managed the Short Parliament when it met in April 1640, and not a penny would it vote until the stored-up grievances of fifteen years were redressed in full. After three weeks sitting it was dissolved, and Strafford told the Council that after its refusal of supplies ‘the King is loose and absolved from all rules of government’. If tyranny was too strong a word for the last decade’s fumbling parody of Tudor autocracy, it was apt enough for what now ensued. But it was not to last long; the fiasco of the Second Bishops’ War finished it. The reluctant levies which were led to the northern border in the summer mutinied, deserted, broke open gaols, threw down enclosures and made bonfires of the new communion-rails in the parish churches. Before this rabble of an army could strike, the Scots invaded and put it to disgraceful rout at Newburn on the Tyne. Charles again was forced to a truce; and this time the Scots were to remain in occupation of northern England, receiving £850 a day until a treaty was completed in London, where a new Parliament was to meet without delay.

The Long Parliament assembled on 3 November. Never had elections been fought so widely on political issues; never had the peers and gentry of the ‘country interest’ assembled with such confident purpose over the programme they meant to carry through. For the King could not dissolve them as he had dissolved the Short Parliament. Only their votes of supplies could hold the Scots north of the Tees, and pay the reduced English forces which still made a show of facing them. But with Strafford still at large, with two armies afoot on English soil, and a third raised for heaven knew what purpose in Ireland, with the London mob in a mood for bloody riots, it is no wonder that their proceedings were pitched in a high key, shot through even with moments of panic. Not that anyone seriously feared civil war in England. Why should they? The Scots were generally regarded as allies rather than enemies, and their presence as an opportunity to carry measures that would secure the subject’s liberty and property for good. Pym seized it with both hands. The first step was to lodge Strafford in the Tower, impeached of high treason; Laud followed him there somewhat later. The story of how Strafford fought for his life before the Lords, and how Parliament, failing to pin its far-fetched charges of treason on him, brought him to the block by a tyrannous Act of Attainder, is one of the high tragedies of Stuart history. It might just have been averted, had not some royalist hotheads hatched a crazy plot to employ part of the English army in a coup against the Parliament, just when Strafford’s fate hung in the balance. Strafford released the King from his promise to protect his life and fortune, and Charles sacrificed him in the hope of winning peace for his kingdom and safety for his threatened Queen. He never forgave himself.

Before Strafford’s head fell in May 1641, Parliament had already launched upon the great series of acts which was to bring the royal authority back within the bounds of ‘fundamental law’. Having passed the Triennial Act to ensure frequent sessions in the future, it secured itself by another statute against being dissolved without its own consent. It abolished Star Chamber and the other prerogative courts, asserted its power over all customs dues and closed every loophole for non-parliamentary taxation from ship money downwards. By August the programme was complete, save for what needed to be done in the matter of religion. The alarms of the spring were dying down. The Scots withdrew across the Tweed in September; the Irish army was being disbanded and the English...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENT
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PROLOGUE - TURNHAM GREEN
• 1 - Background to Civil War
• 2 - The War Takes Shape
• 3 - Marston Moor
• 4 - Winter of Discontent
• 5 - The New Model Army
• 6 - Naseby
• 7 - Victory Without Peace
• 8 - Preston
• EPILOGUE - MARSTON MOOR REVISITED
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER