Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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changes demanded in the Nineteen Propositions. The majority were as

attached to the ancient constitution, as reinforced in 1641, as the moderate

royalists were, but rightly saw it as still under threat from a king whose polit-

ical judgement was disastrous and whose word could not be trusted. If there

had been some sure way of restraining Charles’s power to do mischief with-

out impairing the powers of his successors, most would probably have been

content. Most parliamentarians were social conservatives, but over the future

of the church they were deeply divided. The primarily defensive attitudes of

both moderate parliamentarians and constitutional royalists is the main rea-

son why the war was so long in coming about. They could not see why their

differences could not be bridged by negotiation, and it was only the slow real-

ization that the king and the parliamentary leadership were irreconcilable

that made them accept, with dismay, the need for military preparations.

Such preparations went ahead slowly from June onwards, on both sides.

Parliament passed an ordinance on the 9th, calling on the public to contribute

money, plate, or horses for its service, and most members of both Houses who

were still at Westminster pledged generous sums from their own purses. The

queen was now making large purchases of arms in the Netherlands with

the proceeds of the crown jewels. On the 17th the Earl of Newcastle secured

the city of that name for the king, and went on to garrison Tynemouth Castle

and fortify Shields at the mouth of the river—a good place for the queen to

land her purchases. The activities of the commissioners of array gave parlia-

ment a pretext on 4 July to set up a Committee of Safety, consisting of

leading activists from both houses, to advise on what was necessary to

preserve the peace of the kingdom. It rapidly became an embryonic gov-

ernment, the distant ancestor of a modern war cabinet.

There followed a series of debates from the 9th onward on the raising of an

army. Many members faced the prospect with deep dismay. Old Sir Benjamin

Rudyard reminded the House of all that parliament had already secured, and

urged it to ‘beware we do not contend for such a hazardous unsafe security,

as may endanger the loss of what we have already . . . Every man here is bound

in conscience to employ his uttermost endeavours to prevent the effusion of

blood: blood is a crying sin, it pollutes a land; let us save our liberties and our

estates, as we may save our souls too’. Bulstrode Whitelocke, who unlike

Rudyard was to play a prominent political role under the Commonwealth

and Protectorates, said unhappily:

It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war, by

one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which hath brought us

thus far, and we scarce know how, but from paper combats . . . we are now come to

the question of raising forces, and naming a General and ofﬁcers of our army.

228 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Rushworth, Historical Collections, III, pt. i, pp. 753–4.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 228

He would have had a committee consider how the Nineteen Propositions

might be modiﬁed, in order to reach an accommodation; but the House ﬁnal-

ly voted on the 12th that an army should be raised forthwith, and that Essex

should be its General.

Charles had just appointed Robert Bertie, Earl of Lindsey, the 59-year-old

former commander of the Ship Money ﬂeet, as his commander-in-chief. But

within days he made his nephew Prince Rupert, the present Elector Palatine’s

brother, general of the horse, and authorized him to act if he thought ﬁt with-

out orders from Lindsey, which made the latter’s position impossible. He was

still desperately short of money, and he was sustained through the summer

largely by a series of enormously generous gifts from the catholic Earl of

Worcester, whose son Lord Herbert of Raglan acted as their bearer.

With increasing numbers of men under arms, and mobs turning out with

makeshift weapons, there were bound to be some violent episodes, as well as

a certain amount of casual pillage. A confused affray occurred at Manchester

on 15 July when Lord Strange, the Earl of Derby’s heir, was being feasted by

the chief townsmen. Three of parliament’s deputy lieutenants called out some

of the militia in protest, and a ﬁght broke out between them and some of

Strange’s 120 attendant cavaliers. Blood was shed on both sides, and a mili-

tiaman who died of his wounds has sometimes been reckoned the ﬁrst fatal

casualty of the Civil War. He may have been preceded by a victim of one of

several skirmishes near Hull, which was beset by royal troops from 4 July.

There might have been heavier losses at Marshall’s Elm in Somerset on

4 August when John Pyne MP, at the head of about ﬁve hundred trained

bands, was ambushed by Henry Lunsford and a hundred or so cavaliers, if

Pyne and his men had not made off so quickly. But both sides were, on the

whole, so reluctant to strike the ﬁrst blow that such skirmishes as these were

quite exceptional until after the king had given the formal signal for war.

There were, however, enough breaches of the peace and rumours of war to

nourish the fear of a general breakdown of order, and this was reﬂected in

widespread difﬁculty in collecting rents, reluctance to bring cattle to market,

and other symptoms of economic dislocation. In the fenlands there was more

destruction of enclosures and ditches than usual, but that was more because

the commoners were expecting parliament to relieve them from exploitation

than because they were kicking over the traces in expectation of civil war.

A violent mob that gathered for the purpose in Lincolnshire early in April,

however, was heard to say ‘that if the parliament would not help them, they

would help themselves by club law’.

Many landowners in other parts sensed

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 229

Manning, English People and the English Revolution, p. 167; E. Broxap, The Great Civil

War in Lancashire (Manchester, 2nd ed., 1973), pp. 16–20.

The Private Journals of the Long Parliament, 7 March to 1 June 1642, ed. V. F. Suon and

A. S. Young (New Haven, 1987), p. 132; Manning, English People, pp. 133–4; C. Holmes,

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 229

a greater than usual tension between their tenantry and themselves, and there

were enough examples of open deﬁance by angry mobs to feed an apprehen-

sion that the law was breaking down. Perhaps the worst episode began on

20 August in puritan Colchester, when it was learnt that Sir John Lucas, who

lived nearby, was about to set off to join the king with twelve horses and

sundry arms. The trained bands assembled, along with 400 or more volun-

teers for the parliamentary army and a crowd of men, women, and children

variously estimated at between 2,000 and 5,000. They besieged Lucas’s

house. Next day the mob broke into it, seized him and his family, and forced

a terriﬁed mayor and aldermen to shut them in the town gaol for their own

safety. Then when they had done all the damage they could to Lucas’s prop-

erty they split up and attacked other royalist houses in the neighbourhood.

Order was quickly restored, however, when the House of Commons sent

down Sir Thomas Barrington and Harbottle Grimstone to make it clear that

this was not how parliament wished to be served, despite the formal com-

mencement of war on the 22nd.

Outbreaks like this were exceptional, and

even now the fear that the rule of law was collapsing was exaggerated. The

king’s judges rode their circuits and held the assizes as usual in July and

August, and the JPs held their quarter sessions almost everywhere, not only in

July but in October too.

The gathering clouds of war were distracting public attention from Ireland,

and diverting military resources that would surely have been employed there

if England had not been obsessed with her own troubles. Although the mili-

tary situation in Ireland did not change dramatically after the rebellion

reached its maximum extent early in 1642, there were important political

developments during the spring and summer. Most of the Old English had

now joined the rising while retaining a distinct military organization, but an

important minority of Old English and anglicized Irish nobles, led by

Ormond and including Clanricard, Thomond, and Inchiquin, continued to

hold out against them and aligned themselves with the English royalists. The

enmity between the rebels and the English parliament was increased when

the latter decided in February that the suppression of the rebellion should

be ﬁnanced by raising £1,000,000 from the sale of 2,500,000 acres of

conﬁscated Irish land to any ‘adventurers’ who would put up the money. The

king gave his assent to the resultant Adventurers’ Act on 19 March. He

could hardly have refused it without appearing soft towards the rebels,

230 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Seventeenth-Century Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1980), pp. 154–6. Keith Lindley, in Fenland Riots

and the English Revolution (1982), p. 139, argues that most fenland commoners were indiffer-

ent to the national issues of the Civil War, except when the political situation enabled them to

further their immediate social and economic interests.

Manning, English People, pp. 171–4.

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 230

who were still declaring their loyalty to him, but he made it harder for

them to do so with any sincerity. King and parliament were both committed

now to a policy of total reconquest and large-scale conﬁscation, and the

prospects for Irish landlords became bleaker when the Scots asked for,

and got, the right to participate in the adventurers’ scheme. Scotland also

secured a substantial share in the military programme, and the ﬁrst contin-

gent of 2,500 Scottish troops under Colonel Robert Monro landed in Ulster

early in April. The Dublin government’s forces had already cleared the Pale,

and on 15 April Ormond soundly beat a rebel army of 6,000 at Kilrush.

He could not keep up the campaign because his unpaid and ill-shod men

refused to march again, but the rebel cause was looking a little shaky by the

late spring.

It was given new life in the summer, ﬁrst by a striking initiative on the part

of the Irish catholic clergy, and then by the return of Owen Roe O’Neill and

other distinguished soldiers from the Spanish army in Flanders. The clergy,

led by those of Armagh but soon on a nationwide basis, urged the need for a

central decision-making organization for the whole of Ireland, embracing

both churchmen and laymen. They held a series of crucial meetings at

Kilkenny in May and early June, to the latter of which they invited leaders of

the catholic laity. From their joint deliberations there emerged a scheme for a

central supreme council, to be chosen by an elected national assembly and

backed by four provincial councils. Together they declared that the current

war was a just war, and that catholics who declined to take part in it should

be automatically excommunicated. They pledged themselves to put an end to

rivalry between provinces, and to make no difference whatever between Irish

and Old English. They framed a new oath of association to bind together the

‘confederated catholics of Ireland’ in what came to be known as the Confed-

eration of Kilkenny. The Confederates swore to bear true allegiance to

Charles, ‘King of Great Britain, France and Ireland’, to maintain the power

and privileges of the Irish parliament, the fundamental laws of Ireland, the

free exercise of the Roman Catholic religion and the lives, liberties, estates,

and rights of all their associates, and to obey the commands of the supreme

council. They set up a provisional executive of twelve men and made arrange-

ments for the election of a representative General Assembly to meet in

October.

The Confederates expressly disclaimed the title and authority of a parlia-

ment for their General Assembly, in the same way as they constantly afﬁrmed

their allegiance to the king. But they were in fact creating an alternative gov-

ernment to that which he sought to maintain through his Lord Lieutenant

Ormond, and they were of course defying the proclamation that he issued on

26 February 1642, ordering all those in arms in Ireland to surrender. They

could maintain the assumption that in commanding them thus, and in the

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 231

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 231

Adventurers’ Act, he was acting under duress; and in the English Civil War

that was so clearly imminent when they set up the Confederation it was obvi-

ously more advantageous to them that the king should win, rather than the

parliament in alliance with the Covenanting Scots. Moreover they had to take

account of the deeply felt royalism of so many of the Old English nobles and

gentry whose alliance they needed, and there was always the chance that

Charles’s military needs would give them the chance to strike an advanta-

geous deal with him.

Yet although these considerations militated against the Confederation

becoming a movement for national independence in its early years, the poten-

tial was there, and there were two elements within it whose interests might

tend that way. There were the clergy, especially the higher clergy whose train-

ing had given them a cosmopolitan and ultramontane outlook. They had

little of the ingrained loyalty to the heretical royal house that most of the Old

English still felt, and their natural hope was ultimately to recover the alien-

ated wealth of the church, which the crown was never likely to grant. Much of

it had stuck to the ﬁngers of lay landowners, who were consequently inclined

to put a curb on clerical pretensions. The senior clergy’s loyalty was not undiv-

ided, but in the last resort it went mostly to Rome. They were instrumental,

by enlisting a bit of diplomatic pressure from the papacy, in persuading the

governor of the Spanish Netherlands to release Owen Roe O’Neill, the

nephew of the Earl of Tyrone who had ﬂed Ireland in 1607, and the veteran

of over thirty years’ distinguished service in the forces of the King of Spain.

Spain herself, with Catalonia and Portugal in rebellion and the long, grinding

war with France on her hands, could neither spare further help nor afford to

provoke England, but O’Neill brought some other ofﬁcers (and some muni-

tions) when he slipped home at the end of July 1642, and more were to fol-

low. They formed the other signiﬁcant group whose ties to the house of Stuart

were weaker than those of most of the indigenous landed class. O’Neill was

to go on professing his allegiance to King Charles until he himself died in

1649, but how long it would have survived the establishment of the Com-

monwealth is matter for doubt. At any rate the return of the exiles trans-

formed the military direction of the rebellion. O’Neill was promptly accepted

as general of the army of Ulster. Two other senior veterans followed him

home to Ireland in September: Thomas Preston, an uncle of Lord Gor-

manston, who became general of the army of Leinster, and John Burke, a

kinsman of Clanricard, who took over that of Connaught. Garret Barry,

another veteran of the Spanish service, was a less successful appointment in

Munster and did not last long, but on the whole the military competence of

the commanders in the ﬁeld improved dramatically. It would take time to

turn the Irish irregulars into soldiers, and money and munitions would

remain woefully short; but time would not be lacking while England became

232 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

ch7.y8 27/9/02 10:46 AM Page 232

engrossed in civil war, and the Confederation’s constitution provided a

means of raising taxes. That and the disposal of armed forces were not the

only sovereign powers that the Confederation assumed, for over the next six

years it would also enact laws, issue coinage, and appoint and instruct ambas-

sadors to foreign powers.

Three Kingdoms in Crisis 233

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eight

The Blast of War

There was no sharply deﬁned beginning to the English Civil War. The king

sought to give it one by ceremonially raising his standard at Nottingham on

22 August 1642 and summoning his subjects to aid him in suppressing the

rebellion headed by the Earl of Essex, but even as a symbolic gesture this was

to fall ﬂat. There had already been clashes of arms in various parts of the

country for some weeks past, and it would be many weeks more before

Charles’s military commanders felt capable of offering battle. Very many of

his subjects clung to a hope that open war might yet be averted by a negoti-

ated settlement, or expected that if it came to the worst the quarrel might be

decided by a single battle. Many thought ﬁrst about the interests of their own

communities and set about negotiating local pacts of neutrality, hoping there-

by to keep any war there might be outside the bounds of their particular coun-

ties or cities.

Charles, unlike most of his subjects, felt no reluctance about going to war;

his problem was that he lacked the men and the means to wage it. When he

ran up his standard, Essex already had a strong military advantage and

enjoyed much broader support. He had the authority, indeed the command,

of parliament to raise horse and foot, and that gave him the head start of

launching his recruiting campaign in the capital. London’s citizens not only

furnished a unique concentration of truly popular support for the parlia-

ment’s cause, but had for some time been showing a growing enthusiasm for

amateur military exercises. This found an outlet in the Honourable Artillery

Company and other voluntary societies, as well as in the best trained bands in

the kingdom. The home counties too had a strong vein of puritanism and a

greater than average awareness of national political issues, and they too pro-

vided Essex with many volunteers. At this stage, also, there was public ﬁnan-

cial support for those who were willing to raise men and lead them. To each

captain who undertook to furnish a troop of horse parliament gave £1,000 as

‘mounting money’, and each colonel of foot received a sum of ‘levy money’

when he had raised a certain number of men. Essex was personally popular,

both as the bearer of a great name and as an outspoken Country peer, and he

threw himself into the task of raising an army with energy and panache. His

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 234

The Blast of War 235

military expertise was apt to be exaggerated, for his service in the German

wars lay far in the past and was limited to defensive operations, while his role

in the 1625 Cadiz expedition as Vice-Admiral and Colonel-General had been

decidedly less than glorious. But with the help of some more experienced sub-

ordinates he made a fair professional job of organizing a sizeable army at

short notice.

If he had shown a similar zest for leading it against the enemy,

the war might have been shorter. There was great public enthusiasm when he

held a general muster of volunteers in the Artillery Garden on 26 July, and

before Charles had raised his standard Essex and his General of the Horse, the

Earl of Bedford, had recruited ﬁfty-nine troops of cavalry, each nominally of

sixty men, and four of dragoons. On 9 September he set out to engage the king

with an army estimated (probably with slight exaggeration) to number

15,000. With him in his life guard rode a bevy of men who were soon to make

their own military and political reputations, including Henry Ireton, Charles

Fleetwood, Thomas Harrison, Nathaniel Rich, Edmund Ludlow, Matthew

Thomlinson, and Francis Russell.

The king was far from ready to meet him. He had been deeply disappointed

by the response of the Yorkshire gentry to his presence among them. During

July and August his drums had beaten for recruits in various parts of the

county and in adjacent shires, but very few men indeed had come in. He had

made a series of personal progresses to Doncaster, Lincolnshire, Notting-

hamshire, and Leicestershire, but though many of the gentry and some town

corporations gave him a loyal welcome he found very little response at the

social levels from which the rank and ﬁle of armies were drawn. He fared no

better with the trained bands. Those of Yorkshire had a total nominal

strength of about 12,000, but when he commanded their ‘strict appearance’

at a rendezvous on 4 August it was reported that barely 200 turned up. As has

been seen, Hertford’s recruiting campaign in the west country was meeting

with no more success. The Earl of Northampton was doing rather

better in Warwickshire, partly because his intense rivalry with Lord Brooke

of Warwick Castle was causing most of the local gentry and many common-

ers to take sides. During August he conducted a small-scale siege of the castle,

which was threatening enough to induce parliament to send Brooke a reliev-

ing force. On the 18th, just outside Warwick, about 6,000 horse and foot

under Brooke confronted about 5,000 under Northampton, who formally

demanded Brooke’s submission and the surrender of the castle. But this was

before the royal signal for war had been given, so after Brooke had deﬁed the

royalist lords with similar ﬂights of rhetoric the two forces backed off.

This account of the king’s recruiting campaign is based largely on Joyce Lee Malcolm,

Caesar’s Due: Loyalty and King Charles 1642–1646 (1983), and Ronald Hutton, The Royalist

War Effort 1642–1646 (1982). That of Essex is described in Vernon F. Snow, Essex the Rebel

(Lincoln, Nebr., 1970), ch. 12.

ch8.y8 27/9/02 10:52 AM Page 235

236 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

Charles had, however, published a proclamation on the 12th, announcing

his intention to raise his standard at Nottingham ten days later. When he set

out from York he had only about 800 horse and not so much as a regiment of

infantry with him. Hoping apparently to capitalize on Northampton’s efforts

in Warwickshire, he swiftly moved far beyond Nottingham to Coventry,

where the county’s magazine was kept. He was making a practice now of

securing the trained bands’ arms even when he could not enlist the men them-

selves, but it was meeting with growing resistance. Coventry had a royalist

mayor and a divided corporation, but there was a strong puritan element

among the citizens. The city had as yet no garrison, but when Charles

appeared before the walls some of the citizenry turned out in arms and ﬁred

on his troops, wounding several and killing some horses. The puritan party

kept Coventry ﬁrmly on the parliament’s side for the rest of the war.

The raising of the standard followed upon this rebuff. It was a cheerless and

muted ceremony, at which Charles’s looks betrayed his own melancholy. So

few came to witness it that some in his small retinue suggested postponing it;

but it went ahead, though he had not even enough foot soldiers to furnish his

standard with a round-the-clock guard. Two or three nights later a strong

wind blew it down. On the very day he raised it the parliamentarian relief

force for Warwick Castle, which included John Hampden and the regiment

that he had personally raised in Buckinghamshire, forced Northampton to

abandon the siege. On the night of 22–3 August, and sporadically through the

next morning, these parliamentarians, together with Brooke’s men and other

local levies, skirmished with Northampton’s forces near Southam, east of

Warwick. This clash has been claimed as the ﬁrst battle of the Civil War, but

though there was some cannon-ﬁre and a few fatal casualties, mainly on the

royalist side, it hardly amounted to that. The parliamentarians had the better

of it, and were rapturously welcomed in Coventry next day.

Charles’s commissions of array proved to be a quite ineffective way of rais-

ing a ﬁeld army. He only began to assemble the makings of one when he set-

tled at Shrewsbury for three weeks in late September and early October. He

did so by a method which the crown continued to employ down to the

Napoleonic wars, and was similar to what Essex and the parliament were cur-

rently employing; namely by granting commissions to individual noblemen

and gentlemen to raise regiments in his name. On this basis the Earl of Derby

raised three foot regiments in Lancashire, and other prominent landowners in

Wales, Cheshire, and Staffordshire recruited eleven more, all largely at their

own expense. In practice this left the choice of subordinate ofﬁcers almost

entirely to the colonels in charge, and since losses of men through casualties

or desertion were seldom fully made good, the royal army faced a growing

problem as the war went on of over-ofﬁcered regiments with a mere

fraction of their complement in troopers or foot soldiers.

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The Blast of War 237

Another problem was that in some of the most fertile recruiting areas a high

proportion of the gentry were Roman Catholics. Two thirds of the royalist

gentry in Lancashire were of that faith. Catholics outside court circles had

little to thank the king for (though they might reckon that a parliamentarian

triumph would make their condition even worse), and their support for him

varied widely from region to region. Publicly they got no thanks for it, for

Charles had ruled in his formal orders of war that ‘No papist of what degree

or quality soever shall be admitted to serve in our army’,

and he solemnly

repeated the ban in the royal declaration that accompanied the raising of his

standard. One cannot believe that he intended to keep such pledges, and they

did not deceive anyone for long. The Earl of Newcastle, his commander in the

four northern counties, was raising a separate army for him in those parts,

and making no discrimination against catholic ofﬁcers. In the country as a

whole, but especially in the north, the number of catholics who took up arms

for the king was impressive. Of the 603 ofﬁcers whom he commissioned as

colonels in the course of the war, 117 were catholics, and so (by one estimate)

were two in ﬁve of all the ofﬁcers who died ﬁghting for him.

Catholics were

no less generous in their ﬁnancial support. His war effort was still being sus-

tained, apart from the sale of a few peerages, very largely by voluntary con-

tributions, and by far the most muniﬁcent were those of the catholic Earl of

Worcester. Ironically, he still relied on the recusancy ﬁnes which catholics

had to pay for not attending parish worship, and which most of them settled

by an annual composition. In September he appealed to the recusant gentry

of Shropshire and Staffordshire to help him with a two or three years’

advance, and they promptly came up with between £4,000 and £5,000.

At Shrewsbury he did not feel immediately threatened by Essex’s army,

which was making very sluggish progress. Essex reviewed about 15,000 men

when he held a general muster at Northampton on 14 September, but many

of them lacked training, discipline, and equipment, and he stayed in the town

a whole week. On the 19th he set out again for Worcester, believing that to be

the king’s objective. Sir John Byron, the poet’s ancestor and a devoted cava-

lier, had indeed arrived in Worcester from Oxford with much of the plate of

the university and its colleges, some chests of money, his own regiment of

horse, and a band of student volunteers. The king sent Prince Rupert to secure

the city and provide Byron and his treasure with an escort, but Rupert de-

cided on arrival that Worcester’s delapidated fortiﬁcations were indefensible

Quoted in Malcolm, Caesar’s Due, p. 49. On Lancashire catholic royalists see B. G. Black-

wood, The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660 (Chetham Society, Man-

chester, 1978), esp. pp. 27, 64.

P. R. Newman, The Old Service: Royalist Regimental Colonels and the Civil War, 1642–46

(Manchester, 1993), ch. 4; Malcolm, Caesar’s Due, p. 51.

Clarendon, History of the Rebellion, II, 338–9.

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