Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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248 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

in disputed territories which tried to obey both sides. Magistrates and others

in authority who thus bowed to the prevailing wind were not necessarily act-

ing out of cynical opportunism, but rather out of a desire to preserve what

they could of local autonomy and save the people under their charge from the

worst depredations of war. In south Wales, where such gentry were in the

majority, they were called ‘ambidexters’, and they thought it no shame to

transfer their nominal allegiance if their counties changed hands. Such as they

were common enough in most counties to make nonsense of those old maps

which divided all England and Wales into red and blue areas, purporting to

show which were for the parliament and which for the king. The most that

maps can convey is which side had the military ascendancy and where at a

given date, and they should always allow for disputed territory.

Yet however widespread such pragmatic attitudes were, the Civil War

would not have been fought to a ﬁnish over nearly four wasting years if there

had not been large numbers of more positively committed men on both sides.

What moved people to give their allegiance to one or the other is a question

of endless interest to historians, and the answers are neither simple nor free

from controversy. We know most about the prominent activists because they

were the most articulate, but even among them there was a wide spectrum of

motive and aspiration on both sides. On the parliament’s they ranged from

conservative constitutionalists like Denzil Holles or Sir Robert Harley, who

would have rested content with England’s time-honoured frame of govern-

ment as safeguarded by the statutes of 1641 if they could have trusted the king

to honour the latter, to such a crypto-republican as Henry Marten, who was

expelled by the House of Commons in August 1643 for saying: ‘it were bet-

ter one family [the king’s] should be destroyed than many’. Republicans were

very rare birds, however, before the late 1640s. On the king’s side there was

an equally wide range between out-and-out cavaliers such as the Gorings,

father and son, and the courtiers Henry Jermyn and Jack Ashburnham, who

regarded the 1641 reformers as little better than rebels and had no qualms

about the likely political outcome of a total royalist victory, and on the other

hand the constitutional royalists like Hyde and Falkland who had rallied to

the king after the 1641 reforms (which they supported) were enacted, and

remained as concerned for the rights of parliament as for the prerogatives of

the crown. Ideologically, the constitutionalists of both sides were closer to

each other than to the extremists in their own camp.

It is not very fruitful to debate (as many have) whether political or religious

convictions had the greater inﬂuence on allegiance. It was a matter of degree,

and it varied greatly between individuals; religion, one senses, played a negli-

gible part in the motivation of Sir Thomas Lunsford or Henry Marten, and a

very large one in that of Hyde and Falkland and Cromwell and Milton. But

the idea of politics and religion as alternative grounds for their allegiance

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The Blast of War 249

would have seemed strange to most seventeenth-century minds, which saw

the two as intertwined. They would have seen no inconsistency between

acknowledging that the immediate issues over which king and parliament had

come to blows were secular ones, such as the powers and privileges of parlia-

ment, the extent of the royal prerogative, the control of the armed forces, and

the appointment of councillors and ministers, and yet making their choice

according to which side they thought would better uphold the religious ideals

and ecclesiastical principles in which they believed. Nor was it just a matter

of making a judgement as to which cause most deserved God’s blessing,

though most people must have tried to do so. It also came naturally to them

to associate particular political principles with particular forms of religion—

to believe on the one side that absolutist tendencies in the state were part and

parcel of popery and Arminianism, or to hold with Laud on the other that

puritans hankered after ‘parity’ in both church and state and were therefore

no good subjects for a monarchy. To royalists, taking up arms against the

Lord’s anointed was simply wicked in itself; ‘rebellion is as the sin of witch-

craft’ (2 Samuel 15: 22) was a favourite biblical text. The manner in which

religious considerations swayed the allegiance of parliamentarians, especial-

ly those of the middling sort, is well conveyed in a much quoted passage from

the reminiscences of Richard Baxter, a youngish clergyman (in 1642) whom

the local royalists drove out of his living in Kidderminster, and who after min-

istering to the garrison in Gloucester became a chaplain in the New Model

Army. He wrote:

But though it must be confessed that the public safety and liberty wrought very much

with most, especially with the nobility and gentry who adhered to the parliament, yet

it was principally the differences about religious matters that ﬁlled up the parliament’s

armies and put the resolution and valour into their soldiers, which carried them on in

another manner than mercenary soldiers are carried on. Not that the matter of

bishops or no bishops was the main thing (for thousands that wished for good bishops

were on the parliament’s side) . . . But the generality of the people through the land (I

say not all, or every one) who were then called puritans, precisians, religious persons,

that used to talk of God, and heaven, and Scripture, and holiness, and to follow ser-

mons, and read books of devotion, and pray in their families . . . I say, the main body

of this sort of men, both preachers and people, adhered to the parliament.

Baxter conjures up well the strain of piety that inclined people to the par-

liament’s side, and rightly acknowledges that they included many moderate

episcopalians. Many royalists were motivated by equally sincere religious

convictions, including a strong attachment to the Prayer Book services and

sacraments, a liking for reverence and hierarchy, a devotion to the annual

round of Christian festivals, and a sense that the church was a guarantor of the

Reliquiae Baxterianae, ed. M. Sylvester (1696), p. 31.

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250 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

traditional order in the state and society. Many gentry felt a strong antipathy

towards Presbyterianism, which became an imminent threat when the Scot-

tish alliance was sealed. Lay elders, they feared, would introduce a popular

element in parish discipline and subvert the traditional partnership in author-

ity between squire and parson.

There has been controversy over the role of Roman Catholics in the Civil

War. Given the parliament’s extreme hostility to papists, their choice lay

between supporting the king or staying as neutral as they could. Over the

country as a whole the great majority chose the latter option, especially those

below the ranks of the gentry. But the high proportion of catholic colonels in

the king’s service has already been noted, and there were wide regional dif-

ferences in the response of the catholic gentry. Almost two thirds of the

actively royalist families in Lancashire were catholics, as were a third of those

in Yorkshire, and in Cheshire too the proportion of committed royalists

among the catholic gentry was much higher than that among the protestant

ones. These were counties with large recusant populations, but in others

where catholics were thick on the ground, notably Monmouthshire, Cum-

berland, and Westmorland, the majority remained inactive. It seems general-

ly true that among the catholics who did commit themselves to the king’s

cause an impressively high proportion actually fought for him. Their loyalty

is striking, for outside court circles the catholic community as a whole had lit-

tle to thank Charles for. The leadership of the great catholic magnates, espe-

cially Derby, Worcester, and Winchester, enlisted many in his cause. They

may well have calculated that an outright parliamentarian victory would be

likely to worsen their lot, but, most were probably more strongly moved by

the same spirit of ingrained loyalty to the crown that ﬁred their Anglican

fellow-ofﬁcers.

So far, little has been said about social distinctions between the two

sides. A generation or two ago that would have seemed very shocking, for in

the post-war decades socio-economic explanations of the Civil War were de

rigueur. But all attempts to depict it as some kind of class war have foundered,

because closer research (especially into county and other local communities)

has shown that every order of society was substantially represented on

both sides. That is not to say that royalists and parliamentarians were

socially indistinguishable, but rather that the pattern again varies from region

to region, and that attempts to establish socio-economic factors as the pri-

mary determinants of allegiance, nationwide, have proved unfruitful. Some

K. J. Lindley, ‘The part played by catholics’, in B. S. Manning (ed.), Politics, Religion and

the English Civil War (1973), is illuminating on regional differences, but underestimates the pro-

portion of active royalists among the gentry of Lancashire, Yorkshire, and Cheshire. Lindley’s

and other recent research on the subject is evaluated by John Morrill in The Nature of the Eng-

lish Revolution (1993), ch. 9.

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The Blast of War 251

generalizations hold true, the simplest being that (as one would expect) the

higher one looks in the social scale the higher the proportion of royalists one

ﬁnds. Men of rank had the biggest interest in preserving the old hierarchical

social order, and many felt it threatened by the violent mob demonstrations,

the anti-enclosure riots and the arming of the plebs from 1642 onward. The

peerage most of all felt their estate to be tied up with that of the monarchy, for

the king knew nearly all of them personally, and they were the greatest bene-

ﬁciaries of his patronage. Yet only about half of them actively supported him

in the war, and the minority that sided with the parliament was a sizeable one,

though it dwindled with the years. Even at this social level not a few stayed

neutral, and some changed sides.

The gentry were much more evenly divided, though over most of the coun-

try a greater proportion of the knights, the wealthier esquires, and the older,

more deeply rooted families were royalist than parliamentarian. It was not so

everywhere; in Suffolk and Dorset, for example, the leading county families

leaned more towards the parliament. In no county were the gentry solid for

one side or the other. The many small squireens who were ﬁnding it a strug-

gle to keep up their gentry status tended to be the least engaged either way,

but in some regions they inclined towards the king, as the upholder of the

social order to which they clung precariously; there were hundreds of such in

the south-west, in Wales and the Marches, and in the far northern counties.

In East Anglia on the other hand the vein of radical puritanism that gave par-

liament some of its staunchest support was strong among the lesser gentry.

One might have expected the Court interest, comprising the courtiers and

paid ofﬁce-holders who had made their living in the service of the crown, to

form a central element in the royalist party. But their response varied widely,

and it would be equally unsafe to assume any strong correlation between the

Country peers and gentry of the 1630s and the active parliamentarians of the

1640s. The issues over which the Civil War was fought were not the same as

those in contention during the personal rule, and many routine ofﬁces in the

administration, like Pym’s, did not commit their holders to a sense of person-

al loyalty to the monarch through thick and thin, especially if they had been

obtained by purchase. Gerald Aylmer, in his magisterial study of the king’s

servants, reckons that of the 900 or so men of gentry or noble status who

enjoyed paid employment in the king’s household or in his central govern-

ment, those who actively supported him in the Civil War were slightly out-

numbered by those who either stayed out of it or sided with parliament.

But though most people formed their own judgement of the merits of the

opposed causes and the worth of the parties that upheld them, their choice

G. E. Aylmer, The King’s Servants: The Civil Service of Charles I, 1625–1642 (rev. ed.,

1974), ch. 6. The estimate is based on a large sample.

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252 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

was often inﬂuenced by local interests and loyalties. The pattern of allegiance

differed so greatly from county to county that to do justice to the wealth of

recent studies, even in summary, would require a chapter to itself. Sampling

must sufﬁce, and it may convey the sheer variety if we compare two pairs of

adjacent shires, in the north, the Midlands, and the south.

Lancashire was one of the more divided counties, the main contrast being

between the rural areas, especially where the Earl of Derby wielded a semi-

feudal authority over a gentry that included a high proportion of his fellow-

catholics, and the clothing districts around Manchester and Bury, which were

strongly puritan and parliamentarian, like the West Riding clothing towns

just across the Pennines. There were about twice as many Lancashire royalist

gentry as parliamentarians, but both combined were far outnumbered by

those who have left no trace of any commitment to either side. Neighbouring

Cheshire was more homogeneous. Most of the leading families were polar-

ized in two groups, competing with each other for precedence in county

affairs, but most were moderate in their political outlook and were drawn

into the war reluctantly; they made one of the strongest attempts to keep it

out through a neutrality treaty. When that failed, they split mainly along the

lines of their local factions, resulting at the outset in slightly more royalists

than parliamentarians. More than twenty changed sides, however, and many

of the nominal royalists lapsed into submission when parliament gained mil-

itary control over most of the county in 1643. But one of the knights of the

shire, Sir William Brereton, headed a minority party of active parliamentar-

ians, drawn mainly from the puritan lesser gentry, and as local parliamentar-

ian commander he won a victory at Nantwich late in January 1643, taking

the town a few days after Sir Thomas Fairfax recaptured Leeds. He could not

dislodge the royalists from Chester, however, until the war was almost over.

Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, Midlands neighbours, were at least

as strongly contrasted. Most of the former was in the hands of wealthy

landowners who had risen to gentry status within the last two or three gener-

ations, whether through ofﬁce-holding or mercantile success or marrying

heiresses. The majority of these were parliamentarian, but the chief local

magnate, the Earl of Northampton, was as we have seen a strong royalist, and

he carried most of his clientele among the county gentry with him.

Northamptonshire thus looks like a perfect illustration of R. H. Tawney’s

class-war interpretation of the English Revolution, with rising ‘bourgeois’

gentry opposed to aristocratically orientated ‘feudal’ types. But next-door

Leicestershire presents a quite different picture, of a county peopled mainly

Blackwood, Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion, 1640–1660; J. S. Morrill,

Cheshire 1630–1660: County Government and Society during the English Revolution (Oxford,

1974).

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The Blast of War 253

by small gentry with long-set local roots and rather narrow horizons. By far

the deepest division among them had little to do with politics or religion or

economic interest, and most were dragged into the war reluctantly, if at all.

They were split by the competing patronage of the two great noble houses in

the county, the Greys, Earls of Stamford and the Hastings, Earls of Hunting-

don, who had long been at feud. Both families had long been puritan, but

when the Greys became strongly parliamentarian and the Hastings just as

strongly royalist, their clienteles among the gentry went the same way. There

was a slight tendency for the older families to adhere to the king and the

newer to parliament, but patronage was the main key to allegiance. Conse-

quently the north and west of the county were predominantly royalist and the

south and east parliamentarian, but Leicestershire saw little of the war until

1645.

Our southern examples, Sussex and Kent, present different kinds of con-

trast. Sussex was even more emphatically divided geographically than Leices-

tershire, here between a parliamentarian east and a royalist west, but for

different reasons. There were no dominant magnates after Elizabeth’s reign,

and local inﬂuence lay mainly with about ninety county families, many with

ancient roots in the county. Many, too, were puritan, especially in east Sus-

sex, but Richard Montagu, who was Bishop of Chichester until 1638, had

been planting fellow-Arminians among the parish clergy wherever he could.

Caroline religious policies were the strongest single source of anti-royalism in

the county. In 1642–3 the ninety leading families split fairly equally between

royalists, parliamentarians, and neutrals, but the east Sussex gentry’s prevail-

ing allegiance to parliament was backed by enthusiastic popular support. The

commitment of the parliamentarian activists was far stronger than that of

their opponents and the rather lukewarm royalism of west Sussex cooled

further after Waller captured Chichester. Kent was different again, except in

being free of magnate dominance. It was home to an exceptionally large num-

ber of gentry, but activists on either side constituted quite a small minority,

and most of them were relative newcomers to their estates. The majority,

especially among the long-established Kentish families, were moderates, and

inclined towards neutralism. They were not much given to puritanism, and

they tended to put local interests before national issues. Most were lukewarm

or merely nominal supporters of parliament at the outset, thanks in part to the

proximity of its military forces, but they were rapidly alienated by the heavy

hand of the county committee of Kent. They were still more antagonized by

the radical turn that parliamentary politics took from 1645 onward, and

A. M. Everitt, The Local Community and the English Civil War (Historical Association

Pamphlet G. 70, 1969).

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254 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

when they rose in large numbers in 1648 they were moved not so much by

devotion to the king as by exasperation with parliamentary tyranny.

Such wide regional differences, and such a tendency for allegiance to be

swayed by local interests and attachments, may seem incompatible with the

claim that most people, at any rate from the middling sort upward, judged the

merits of the two sides for themselves, whether or not they actively support-

ed either. But no one makes judgements in a vacuum, and in the thinly popu-

lated, pre-industrial England of 1642 bonds of neighbourhood were strong.

So were the vertical ties between patron and client, landlord and tenant, and

master and man. Information about current events and issues came to most

people through such channels, or from the pulpit, for the media as we know

them did not of course exist. Even weekly newsbooks, the ancestors of our

newspapers, were a novelty, and only a tiny proportion of the population can

have seen them. The tendency to react politically in the same way as one’s

neighbours or immediate superiors was naturally strong, but the fact that so

many communities and even families were divided in their allegiance shows

that individual choice was by no means stiﬂed.

Towns and cities were specially close communities, and the minority of the

nation that lived in them showed the same tendency to division and attach-

ment to local interests as we have seen in the counties. The tradition that most

towns were ‘nurseries of faction and rebellion’, providing centres of active

support for parliament even in regions predominantly royalist, goes right

back to the time of the Civil War, but modern research is steadily revealing

that the reality was much more complicated. Popular enthusiasm for the par-

liamentary cause was mainly found in towns where puritanism was preva-

lent, for example in the clothing regions already noted, in Coventry,

Birmingham, and urban Norfolk, and above all in London. There were sever-

al reasons why puritanism took strong root in urban communities. It was a

religion of the book, and literacy was high in towns; many craftsmen could

read the bible as they worked. Larger towns provided a choice of places of

worship, and many supported puritan lectureships. Itinerant sectarian

preachers commonly targeted the urban middling sort. The puritan code of

values conferred dignity on the ‘callings’ of craftsmen and traders, and incul-

cated the self-discipline needed for success in them. From the ranks of such

men and their apprentices, and from townsmen lower in the scale such as

porters and watermen, the parliamentary service drew many volunteers. Very

few of this sort enlisted in the king’s forces.

But the active parliamentarianism of many urban puritans does not imply

that the towns in general showed the same commitment. A great deal usually

A. J. Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex 1600–1660 (1975); A. M.

Everitt, The Community of Kent and the Great Rebellion (Leicester, 1973).

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The Blast of War 255

depended on the attitude of the governing corporation, which was generally

drawn from the mercantile elite. Wealthy aldermen and common councilmen

had every reason to fear the interruption of trade and damage to property that

war was likely to bring. Moreover, many of them enjoyed commercial and

political privileges under royal charters, and this could sway them in the

king’s favour even where there was a strong vein of parliamentary feeling

among the citizenry; such was the case in Newcastle and Leeds, for example.

The commonest reaction of city and borough corporations to the onset of war

was one of dismay; they wanted no part in it, and their ﬁrst care was to save

their community from its impact if they could. Puritanism was strong in

Gloucester, but the city fathers were so reluctant to admit a parliamentarian

garrison that it had to force its way in. Bristol’s corporation locked one out

for two days in December 1642 before reluctantly opening the gates to it.

Worcester, after refusing to admit the king’s commissioners of array in

August, let in a parliamentary garrison most unwillingly in December, but

soon made its soldiers wish they had never come. The prime concerns of most

corporations were to preserve their autonomy and to protect their inhab-

itants’ livelihoods, and where they were persuaded to fortify and defend

themselves, it was frequently with the object of keeping out both warring

parties rather than actively supporting either. Their relations with both

military governors and county committees were commonly poor.

The middling and lower orders of rural England outnumbered the entire

urban population several times over, but it is harder to generalize about their

allegiance. There is less evidence about them, and the lower they stood in the

social scale the less chance they usually had of making a free choice, unless

they actually enlisted in one army or another. Nevertheless the once prevalent

notion that the mass of the rural population was ignorant of the issues

between king and parliament, or indifferent to them, will no longer hold

water, and before the war was over the popular voice was to ﬁnd striking

expression in the Clubmen movement, of which more later. One clue to popu-

lar preference may lie in the geography and social organization of rural com-

munities. Historians have for some time been distinguishing two broad types.

One is found where arable farming had long been the main occupation, and

since open-ﬁeld systems required strict communal organization, such regions

were characterized by close-knit village communities, often cemented by still

operative manorial institutions. Such social units generally valued ancient

customs, ceremonies and festivals, and hierarchy prevailed in them. The other

type occurred mainly in regions less suited to tillage, such as heath or fens or

The best survey is by Roger Howell, ‘Neutralism, conservatism and political alignment in

the English Revolution: the case of the towns, 1642–9’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the

English Civil War (1982).

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woodland, where there were (or had been) large amounts of common land

and where population had until recently been thin. Such areas, as well as the

towns, had taken the overspill during the rapid demographic growth of the

last few generations, so they contained many newcomers. They were suitable

for pastoral farming or rural industry, including the overﬂow of clothmaking

from the old urban centres. Their characteristic occupations called for no

such close control as agrarian communities needed, so besides being less

bound by tradition they were generally subject to considerably less social and

political organization. Yet poverty and vagrancy tended to be constant prob-

lems in them, and in many such parishes (it has been argued) the gentry and

the middling sort found a common interest in promoting a puritan code of

godly reformation, not only to save souls but to impose a degree of discipline

on the often unruly lower orders. Hence the greater individualism of the pas-

toral and woodland regions, coupled with their tendency towards pur-

itanism, predisposed them towards the parliamentary side, whereas the

traditionalist values and organization of agrarian communities inclined them

to the king’s.

It would be premature to claim that we have here an explanation of why

some regions were predominantly royalist in sympathy and others parlia-

mentarian, and more work needs to be done before we can say how widely a

propensity towards one side or the other coincided with such contrasted types

of rural community. Clearly there were exceptions: not all wood-pasture

parishes developed a striving after godly discipline, and there were arable

regions, notably in East Anglia, where an alliance of puritan squire and par-

son carried many a village with them. On the other hand one might have

expected the lead miners of Derbyshire to be parliamentarian, but they were

mainly royalist. Yet this line of approach seems to offer far less distortion

than the crude old contrast between a royalist north and west and a

parliamentarian east and south, or than the now happily less frequent

attempts to portray the armed struggle of the 1640s as some kind of class war.

It certainly deserves to be pursued further.

Before the campaigns of 1643 got seriously under way, the winter and spring

saw a prolonged attempt at national level to ﬁnd a basis for a negotiated

peace. The shock of the king’s military threat to London, the revelation of his

256 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

The pioneer of this line of interpretation is David Underdown, in Revel, Riot and Rebellion:

Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford, 1985). Morrill offers a critique of

it in Nature of the English Revolution, ch. 11: ‘The ecology of allegiance in the English Civil

Wars’. A stimulating local study with wider implications is Mark Stoyle, Loyalty and Locality

in Devon during the Civil Wars (Exeter, 1994). For the Derby lead miners see Andy Wood, The

Politics of Social Conﬂict: The Peak Country, 1520–1770 (Cambridge, 1999).

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The Blast of War 257

evident capacity to ﬁght an extended war, and the widespread revulsion

against such a prospect which local neutrality pacts continued to demon-

strate, all served to create a strong peace party at Westminster. It dominated

the small body of peers who continued to sit there, and it was too well sup-

ported in the Commons for Pym to stiﬂe it, even if he had wanted to. He was

probably prepared to consider a compromise settlement, so long as it did not

surrender what he regarded as essentials. Long preparation and debate were

given to a set of propositions which was presented to the king on 1 February,

and inaugurated the so-called Treaty of Oxford. The ﬁrst of them proposed

that the armies on both sides should be disbanded and that the king should

return to his parliament. He was most unlikely to accede to this, but the terms

as a whole did recede signiﬁcantly from those in the Nineteen Propositions of

eight months earlier. They tacitly dropped the demand that every appoint-

ment to the privy council and the major ofﬁcers of state, including the govern-

ors of the king’s children, should be permanently subject to parliamentary

approval. They no longer required the consent of both Houses before new

peers were admitted to parliament. But they still demanded much that

Charles could not in conscience concede: the handing over of ‘delinquents’

for trial by parliament, his assent to the recently passed bill for the total abo-

lition of episcopacy and to whatever parliament should enact in the near

future concerning the government of the church, and his acceptance of what-

ever parliament should determine concerning the control of the armed forces

by sea and land. This was not a realistic agenda for an agreed settlement.

Charles’s response showed that he did not really want one. Instead of dis-

bandment on both sides he proposed an armistice, but since he stipulated that

his forts, his ships, and his revenues should be restored to him he might as well

have openly demanded parliament’s surrender. He also asked it to prepare a

bill for the preservation of the Book of Common Prayer, though he offered in

vague terms to consider a clause in it for the ease of tender consciences. Pym

could see that without mutual disbandment there was no hope of a satisfac-

tory peace, and he just managed to carry a very divided House of Commons

with him; but when the Lords voted for a twenty-day negotiation under a

mere cessation of hostilities, the Commons by a bare three votes concurred.

No such cessation in fact occurred, nor could it while Charles expected it to

be accompanied by the surrender to him of the navy and the forts, which

included the Tower of London. But so unwilling was the peace party to give

up hope, and so well did it suit him to appear willing to negotiate, that it was

mid-April before parliament ﬁnally broke off the ‘treaty’.

How little Charles was really interested in ending the war by compromise

and negotiation can be gauged from the fact that in the middle of March,

shortly before parliament’s commissioners arrived in Oxford, he had a secret

commission prepared, empowering seventeen prominent London citizens

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