English Civil War

The English Civil War was a series of armed conflicts fought between 1642 and 1651 between supporters of King Charles I, the Royalists or Cavaliers, and supporters of Parliament, the Parliamentarians or Roundheads. It was part of a wider set of wars involving Scotland and Ireland, often called the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. Parliament won, the king was tried and executed in 1649, and England was governed for eleven years without a monarch.

Charles I, who became king in 1625, clashed repeatedly with Parliament over money, religion and the limits of royal power. From 1629 he ruled without calling Parliament at all, raising revenue through disputed levies such as ship money. His religious policies, backed by Archbishop William Laud, favoured elaborate ceremony and were seen by many Puritans as close to Catholicism. When Charles tried to impose a new prayer book on Presbyterian Scotland, the Scots rebelled in 1639 and defeated him. Needing funds, he had to recall Parliament in 1640. Its leaders forced through major reforms, and a Catholic rebellion in Ireland in 1641 deepened the crisis. In January 1642 Charles tried and failed to arrest five members of the House of Commons. Both sides began raising armies, and in August the king raised his standard at Nottingham.

The first major battle, at Edgehill in October 1642, was indecisive. The Royalists, strongest in the north, the west and Wales, made their capital at Oxford, while Parliament held London, the south-east and the navy. In 1643 Parliament allied with the Scots, who entered the war on its side. At Marston Moor, near York, in July 1644, a combined Parliamentarian and Scottish army won control of the north, with the cavalry of Oliver Cromwell playing a leading part. Parliament then reorganised its forces into the professional New Model Army under Sir Thomas Fairfax, which crushed the king's main army at Naseby in June 1645. Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646.

Victory divided the winners. Most members of Parliament wanted a settlement with the king and a Presbyterian church, while the army, increasingly radical, demanded religious toleration and wider political rights. Charles negotiated with all sides and secretly agreed to support a Scottish invasion. Royalist risings and the Scottish army were defeated in 1648, notably by Cromwell at Preston. The army then purged Parliament of members who still wanted to negotiate, and the remaining Rump Parliament put the king on trial for treason. Charles I was beheaded outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall on 30 January 1649.

England was declared a Commonwealth, a republic. Cromwell led an army to Ireland in 1649, where the storming of Drogheda and Wexford was followed by the killing of garrisons and some civilians, events still bitterly remembered. The Scots proclaimed the dead king's son as Charles II and invaded England in 1651, but Cromwell defeated them at Worcester on 3 September 1651, ending the wars. Charles II escaped to France.

Figures are uncertain, but a commonly cited conservative estimate is that around 190,000 people died in England, Wales and Scotland from fighting and war-related disease, out of a population of about six million. Losses in Ireland were proportionally much greater.

Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658. Without him the regime soon broke down, and in 1660 the monarchy was restored under Charles II. Yet the wars established that a king could not rule without Parliament's consent, a principle confirmed by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The era also produced influential political thought, including Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan, published in 1651.

Our 1650 map shows the Kingdom of England, with Ireland, and the Kingdom of Scotland at the end of the wars.