The English Civil War

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...