Woolrych Austin. Britain in Revolution, 1625-1660

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agreement that he made. Unfortunately the Archbishop of Tuam had

recently been killed in a skirmish near Sligo and a copy of Glamorgan’s

August treaty was found on him. It was sent to London and published on

parliament’s orders; consequently when Glamorgan returned to Dublin on

26 December Ormond had him arrested and charged with treason. A month

later the king publicly disavowed Glamorgan’s treaty, and denied that the

earl had any commission to make concessions regarding religion, or to nego-

tiate over anything but the raising of forces, without Ormond’s ‘privity and

directions’. That almost put paid to the chances that any such forces would be

raised. Ormond released Glamorgan when faced with a refusal by the Con-

federates’ Supreme Council to negotiate any further until he was freed, but

Rinuccini had rather lost interest in him by then. The reason was that the

queen had concluded a separate treaty with the pope on her husband’s behalf,

through her envoy Sir Kenelm Digby, and it granted the Irish catholics even

more than Glamorgan had conceded.

During January and February 1646 Charles was trying to keep open even

more incompatible options than have been described so far. On 5 December,

and several times subsequently, he proposed that parliament should send

commissioners to discuss peace terms and asked for safe-conducts for com-

missioners of his own. These overtures were rightly seen as a bid to buy time,

and ignored. He met Montreuil on 2 January and encouraged a plan for the

Scottish army to join with the English presbyterians in ﬁghting for him, with

armed assistance from France. The Scottish commissioners in London were

interested, but he would not pay their price; he was prepared to tolerate Pres-

byterianism, he told Montreuil, but not to make it the established religion of

England. Henrietta Maria, who had persuaded Mazarin to send Montreuil,

was impatient at such scruples, for she could see little to choose between one

form of heresy and another. By January Charles was setting his hopes more

on direct military aid from France, and was urging her to hasten the landing

of 5,000 French troops at Hastings.

But there was no help to be had now from outside the realm, and nothing to

stave off inevitable defeat within it. Early in January Fairfax set off on icy

roads to clear the south-west, leaving enough troops to keep Exeter under

siege. He took Dartmouth by assault on the 19th, then struck north-

westward to engage Hopton. The crucial action was the storming of Tor-

rington on the night of 16 February, for the ensuing pursuit left Hopton with

only the tattered remnants of an army. Hopton went on resisting against

328 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

This account of Charles’s dealings with Ireland is based mainly on A New History of

Ireland, III, 316–20; Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restoration in the Three Stuart Kingdoms,

pp. 160–5; M. Ó. Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Dublin, 1999), chs. 2–3; and

Gardiner, Great Civil War, ch. 39 (not included in the 3-volume edition cited elsewhere in this

book, but printed near the end of the 4-volume edition).

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hopeless odds for as long as the Prince of Wales and his council were still in

the south-west, but the king was now writing to his son repeatedly, urging

him to escape overseas. The prince was really in danger of capture now, and

on 2 March, just as Fairfax’s troops were occupying Bodmin, he sailed for the

Scilly Isles. Soon afterwards Fairfax invited Hopton to treat on honourable

terms, and he capitulated. The disbandment of the king’s army of the west,

such as it was, began on the 20th. Next day the 3,000 men who were left of

his main ﬁeld army, marching from Worcestershire towards Oxford under

old Lord Astley, were utterly defeated at Stow-on-the-Wold. After that only

a few garrisons remained under arms for him. Exeter was the most important

after Oxford and Newark, and on 9 April Fairfax took its surrender on

generous terms—generous not only in granting its defenders all the honours

of war but in guaranteeing its cathedral and indeed all the city’s churches

against defacement. The chivalry with which Fairfax treated his enemies in

their defeat and the discipline that he kept in his army helped to bring an end

to resistance without pointless loss of life; so did the wide publicity given to

the Glamorgan treaty and to the correspondence between king and queen

over military intervention by France. Damaging letters from Henrietta Maria

were intercepted when a French sea captain put into Dartmouth, believing the

port to be still in royalist hands.

Once he was unopposed in the ﬁeld, Fairfax set about preparing to besiege

Oxford. Anxious at all costs to avoid capture, Charles slipped out of the city

at 3 a.m. on 27 April, disguised as a servant, with only his friend Jack Ash-

burnham and his chaplain Michael Hudson for company. His intentions are

something of a mystery, and he may not have been clear about them himself.

He had told his council that he was going to London, and he ﬁrst took a cir-

cuitous route towards the capital. Was this just a feint, or had he some kind

of assurance that he would be well received at Westminster? He halted for

three hours at Hillingdon, as if waiting for a message, and then rode on to

Harrow, within sight of London’s towers. After a night at Wheathampstead

he turned north-eastward to Downham Market in Norfolk. He was heading

now towards the Scottish army, which was besieging Newark and had its

headquarters at Southwell. Montreuil was there, and Charles sent Hudson

forward to seek his assurances that the Scots would support him. But since

Montreuil had been negotiating with the Scots for over seven months, and

Charles had been in personal touch with him since early January, it is strange

that there was such uncertainty about his reception. The fact that Charles

awaited Hudson’s return so close to King’s Lynn suggests that he was keep-

ing open the option of ﬂeeing overseas, if all else failed.

Hudson could not obtain the written assurance of Scottish armed support

that Charles urged Montreuil to procure for him. The Scots commissioners

did, however, assent verbally to four engagements that Montreuil set down

Towards a Resolution 329

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on paper. The most important were that they would not press the king to do

anything against his conscience, and that if parliament refused to restore him

to his rights and prerogatives they would declare for him. With that he had to

be content, and he rode into Southwell on 5 May. From the moment when he

put himself into the Scots’ hands he was treated as a prisoner, and he

remained one for the rest of his life. They insisted for a start that he should

order Newark to surrender, and he did so.

The inevitable surrender of Oxford followed, after a lengthy negotiation.

A few other garrisons still held out, but there is no need to follow their capitu-

lation in detail, for the ﬁrst Civil War was to all intents and purposes over.

330 War in Three Kingdoms 1640–1646

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part ii: further reading

On the events leading to civil war Conrad Russell, The Fall of the British Monarchies

1637–1642 (Oxford, 1991) integrates developments in all three kingdoms as never

before and is essential reading. Anthony Fletcher, The Outbreak of the English Civil

War (1981) retains considerable value for England, while for Scotland David Steven-

son, The Scottish Revolution 1637–44 (Newton Abbot, 1973) is lucid and authorita-

tive. Several essays in John Morrill (ed.), The Scottish National Covenant in its British

Context (Edinburgh, 1990) bear on these years. For events in Ireland A New History

of Ireland, vol. III, provides as ever an excellent survey (see Part I: Further Reading).

It is supplemented by M. Percevall-Maxwell, The Outbreak of the Irish Rebellion of

1641 (Dublin, 1994), the essays in Brian Mac Cuarta (ed.), Ulster 1641: Aspects of the

Rising (Belfast, 1993; revised ed., 1997), Jane H. Ohlmeyer, Civil War and Restor-

ation in the Three Stuart Kingdoms (Cambridge, 1993: focused on Antrim’s career),

Micheàl Ó Siochrú, Confederate Ireland 1642–1649 (Dublin, 1999), and J. H.

Ohlmeyer (ed.), Ireland from Independence to Occupation (Cambridge, 1995). New

light on both Scotland and Ireland is cast by the essays in John R. Young (ed.), Celtic

Dimensions of the British Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 1997).

On politics at Westminster, J. H. Hexter, The Reign of King Pym (Cambridge,

Mass., 1941) has come under cogent criticism from John Morrill in S. Amussen and

M. Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England

(Manchester, 1997), but Hexter is still worth reading. Valerie Pearl gives masterly

treatment to the vital topic of London and the Outbreak of the Puritan Revolution

(Oxford, 1961). Since the late 1960s, however, there has been a most fruitful shift in

the focus of historical research from the capital to the localities, which has shown how

varied were the responses to the war and the patterns of allegiance. The best intro-

duction to this ﬁeld is by John Morrill in Revolt in the Provinces (1999), a revised and

expanded version of his earlier The Revolt of the Provinces (1976). Morrill, besides

writing one of the best county studies in Cheshire 1630–1660 (Oxford, 1974), has

explored the diversity of allegiance further in Part II of his collected essays, The Nature

of the English Revolution (1993). On this topic see also David Underdown, Revel,

Riot and Rebellion (Oxford, 1985) and Joyce L. Malcolm, Caesar’s Due: Loyalty and

King Charles 1642–1646 (1983).

Studies of counties and other local communities have multiplied, and space forbids

the mention of more than a selection. Mary Coate on Cornwall in the Great Civil War

(Oxford, 1937; 2nd ed. Truro, 1963) and A. C. Wood, Nottinghamshire in the Civil

War (Oxford, 1937) were honourable precursors, but the tide really began to ﬂow with

J. T. Cliffe on The Yorkshire Gentry (1969), A. M. Everitt, The Local Community and

the Great Rebellion (1969), the same author’s The Community of Kent and the Great

Rebellion (Leicester, 1970), R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Norfolk in the Civil War (1969),

Eugene A. Andriette, Devon and Exeter in the Civil War (Newton Abbot, 1971),

David Underdown, Somerset in the Civil War and Interregnum (Newton Abbot,

ch10.y8 27/9/02 11:11 AM Page 331

1973), Clive Holmes, The Eastern Association in the English Civil War (Cambridge,

1974), B. G. Blackwood, The Lancashire Gentry and the Great Rebellion (Manches-

ter, 1978), Anthony Fletcher, A County Community in Peace and War: Sussex

1600–1660 (1975), Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire

(Cambridge, 1987), and Roy Sherwood, The Civil War in the Midlands (Stroud,

1992). See also note 17 to Chapter 8.

There are many narrative histories of the ﬁrst Civil War as a whole, all of them

indebted to S. R. Gardiner, The History of the Great Civil War (3 vols., 1886–91;

4 vol. ed. 1893), but for grace and readability none surpasses C. V. Wedgwood, The

King’s War (1958). Those who like their military history written by professional sol-

diers can best turn to Peter Young and Richard Holmes, The English Civil War . . .

1642–1651 (1974), but particularly commendable for its integration of all three king-

doms is Martyn Bennett, The Civil Wars in Britain & Ireland 1638–1651 (Oxford,

1997), the best one-volume history currently available. The authoritative work on the

New Model is Ian Gentles, The New Model Army in England, Scotland and Ireland

1645–1653 (Oxford, 1992). Mark A. Kishlansky, The Rise of the New Model Army

(Cambridge, 1979) is illuminating but sometimes controversial on its formation;

where he and Gentles differ, Gentles is generally to be preferred. C. H. Firth,

Cromwell’s Army (1902, repr. 1992) remains valuable on its composition, organiza-

tion, and equipment. The experience of soldiering is vividly conveyed by Charles Carl-

ton in Going to the Wars (1992), and the same author’s Charles I: The Personal

Monarch (1983) is the best biography for the war years. Two close studies of particu-

lar battles stand out: Peter Newman, The Battle of Marston Moor (Chichester, 1981),

and Glenn Foard, Naseby: The Decisive Campaign (Guildford, 1995). Two books are

particularly valuable for topography: Peter Gaunt, The Cromwellian Gazetteer

(Gloucester, 1987) and Peter Newman, Atlas of the English Civil War (1985). Among

recommendable biographies, John Wilson, Fairfax (1985) is a good popular life,

though serious students will still turn to Sir Clement Markham’s full and scholarly

Life of the Great Lord Fairfax (1890). Similarly, Frank Kitson, Prince Rupert (1994)

is sound and concise, but no modern work really supersedes Eliot Warburton, Mem-

oirs of Prince Rupert and the Cavaliers (3 vols., 1849). John Buchan’s exciting and

well researched Montrose (1928) remains hard to beat. By comparison Vernon F.

Snow, Essex the Rebel (Lincoln, Nebr., 1970) is pedestrian, though useful. For books

on Cromwell see Further Reading for Part IV.

For religious disputes in England and the Westminster Assembly the standard work

is still W. A. Shaw, A History of the English Church during the Civil Wars and under

the Commonwealth (2 vols., 1900).

332 Part II: Further Reading

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part iii

Towards a Kingless Britain

1646–1649

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eleven

Between Two Wars

Between the last battle in the ﬁrst Civil War and the ﬁrst military action in

the second, just over two years elapsed in which the British peoples licked

their wounds and counted the cost of civil strife. Their experience naturally

coloured their attitudes to the quest for a peace settlement and, when that

quest failed, their animus against those whom they counted responsible for

the renewal of war.

Enough has probably been said already about the unprecedented weight of

taxation, the forcing of unwilling conscripts into a hard and dangerous ser-

vice, the burden of free quarter, the commandeering of goods and horses, the

unauthorized plunder by the soldiery of both sides, and the often oppressive

demands made by the parliament’s county committees and by royalist com-

manders. Here is perhaps the place to take stock brieﬂy of the toll that civil

war had so far taken in human lives, in the scars physical and mental that it

had left on the survivors, and in the lasting material damage that it had in-

ﬂicted. The main emphasis will be on England and Wales, because they were

the main theatres of war and their peoples took the heaviest casualties. Ire-

land’s agony still lay mainly in the future, and will be considered in its place.

It is very hard to assess the scale of fatal casualties, because contemporary

estimates often varied wildly and tended to exaggerate. The tally of dead left

on battleﬁelds might be more or less accurately counted, but not the numbers

of those who were cut down in a pursuit or who subsequently died of their

wounds. Moreover major battles account for only about 15 per cent of fatal-

ities; more than three times as many fell in skirmishes or other minor actions,

and sieges were responsible for nearly a quarter. Most of the rest are attribut-

able to exploding powder-barrels, bursting pistols, and fatal accidents with

muskets. A careful recent estimate suggests that the total number who died by

these various means in England and Wales between 1642 and 1651 came to

over 84,000, and that over 62,000 of them perished in the ﬁrst Civil War. In

the seventeenth century, however, war-related diseases, especially typhus and

dysentery and the ravages of plague in besieged cities which allowed no

escape, regularly took a heavier toll than actual combat, and probably carried

off at least 100,000. If these ﬁgures are anything like correct, they may mean

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 335

that in proportion to the whole population the civil wars carried off more

English and Welsh dead than the First World War, and certainly many more

than the Second.

Generally speaking, infantrymen suffered much higher casualties than cav-

alrymen, though it depended very much on whether they served in garrisons

or in ﬁeld armies. Those in the latter who survived the heavy slaughter in

major battles, the gruelling marches with poor footwear and meagre rations,

the epidemics of the camp and the nights in the open, often in wet clothes,

were fortunate, though many lost limbs or bore other scars of war. Common

soldiers who were wounded in the ﬁeld were lucky if they received the services

of a surgeon, and if they did so there was no anaesthetic to relieve the agony

of an amputation and no effective antiseptics to stave off gangrene. Those

who were made prisoners of war would expect to be plundered of any pos-

sessions and stripped of any clothes worth taking, and were likely to be

crammed suffocatingly into churches or other buildings and half starved

before further arrangements were made for them. Sometimes a triumphant

enemy subjected them to collective public humiliation. The luckiest were

exchanged, or set free under promise not to ﬁght again; the unluckiest were

sold as indentured servants to planters in Barbados and worked to death,

though this happened mainly to those taken between 1648 and 1651. Many

on both sides promptly enlisted in their captors’ army, for war had become a

way of life to them; they knew no other trade, and peace must have brought

them problems.

The experience of garrison troops varied very greatly, from relative com-

fort and idleness if they never came under attack to sheer horror if they suc-

cumbed to a direct assault after a long siege. But with regard to sieges, one

cannot draw a hard line between the experiences of soldiers and civilians, or

indeed between those of men and women. All shared, if unequally, the blight

of hunger and hardship and disease that a long siege imposed. Women often

worked alongside men in building fortiﬁcations, putting out ﬁres, taking their

turn at guard duty, bringing food and drink to the soldiers under ﬁre, reload-

ing their muskets, and even sniping with them at the besiegers. There were

famous defences in which women took full command, notably the Countess

of Derby in Lathom House on the king’s side and Lady Brilliana Harvey in

Brampton Bryan Castle on the parliament’s. But the worst civilian suffering

occurred in populous towns which stood long sieges, for the attacking com-

manders seldom allowed women and children to leave since their departure

would allow resistance to be prolonged. One can barely imagine the squalor

and stench when water was too scarce for people to wash their clothes or

336 Towards a Kingless Britain 1646–1649

Charles Carlton, ‘The impact of the ﬁghting’, in John Morrill (ed.), The Impact of the Eng-

lish Civil War (1991), pp. 17–31, esp. 17–20. Charles Carlton writes vividly of the experience of

the civil wars by both soldiers and civilians in Going to the Wars (1992).

ch11.y8 27/9/02 11:18 AM Page 336

bodies, when hunger made them too weak to bury their dead, and when

sewage had no escape from a surrounding ditch or a sluggish mid-town river.

If the defending commander refused terms of surrender and the town was

taken by storm, it was generally reckoned on both sides that the attacking

troops were entitled to what they could get by sacking it. Soldiers who had

been through the extreme danger of assaulting manned fortiﬁcations were apt

to engage in indiscriminate slaughter and wanton destruction, wrecking what

they could not take with them and sell. Yet in comparison with the continen-

tal wars there was generally some restraint, and there seems to have been very

little rape. England experienced nothing remotely comparable to the sack of

Magdeburg in 1631, in which a whole population of perhaps 24,000 per-

ished, let alone the still ghastlier atrocities committed three centuries later in

Japan’s attempt to conquer China and in the war on Europe’s eastern front.

And things were on the whole getting better, not worse, by 1645. Before Fair-

fax stormed Bristol he promised his men two weeks’ pay in lieu of a sack, and

a grateful corporation was glad to help him ﬁnd the money. The discipline of

the New Model Army after Naseby, and Fairfax’s readiness to grant hon-

ourable terms to garrisons, not only shortened a war that might have been

prolonged by desperate resistances, but saved many lives and spared much

property.

Scottish casualties in England were not very heavy in the ﬁrst Civil War,

because Leven’s army did so little serious ﬁghting after Marston Moor. They

would be heavier when the Scots fought for the king in the Preston and

Worcester campaigns of 1648 and 1651, which brought the number of those

killed ﬁghting in England to an estimated total of 6,120. In Scotland itself,

Montrose’s campaigns were small in scale but took a severe toll in men

killed—an estimated 2,400 on his side and 12,300 on the Covenanters’,

though the ﬁgures are in the estimator’s words ‘inspired guesses’.

Material damage in England was generally greater in the towns than in the

countryside, though the destruction of crops and orchards and timber caused

hardship enough at the time. At least 150 towns sustained signiﬁcant destruc-

tion of property, though actual war damage was very unequally distributed,

since in the ﬁrst Civil War there was no serious military action east of a line

drawn through King’s Lynn, Cambridge, London, and Arundel. The Mid-

lands and the Welsh borders were the worst affected areas, though parts of

Wales itself and the West Country suffered considerably. Posterity has

tended to focus on the ruination of churches and castles and mansions, but in

terms of human suffering the destruction of ordinary dwelling-houses took a

far heavier toll. It has been reckoned, necessarily very roughly, that 10,000

houses were demolished or burnt down in towns and at least 1,000 in villages,

Between Two Wars 337

Carlton, Going to the Wars, pp. 211–12.

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