A king raising his standard at Nottingham, 22 August 1642 (1642)
The traditional opening; the standard reportedly blew down the same night
History · Early modern
The English Civil War
1642–1651
King against Parliament, ending in regicide and a republic
A quarrel over taxation, religion and where sovereignty lay turned into open war between Charles I and his Parliament in 1642. Parliament's disciplined New Model Army won it, and in 1649 did what no English parliament had done before: tried and beheaded its king. Britain was a republic for eleven years before the monarchy came back.
How to spot them
- ▸1642–51: three wars between a king and his own parliament, ending on a scaffold in Whitehall
- ▸Quiz clue: 'Cavaliers and Roundheads', 'Edgehill', 'Marston Moor', 'Naseby', 'the Rump'
- ▸The only time an English king has been publicly tried and executed by his subjects
- ▸Produces Britain's only republic, and its only Lord Protector
What happened
'I see the birds have flown' — a king in the Commons chamber, finding five members gone (4 January 1642)
Charles I's attempt to arrest the Five Members; no monarch has entered the Commons since
The night-time rout on a Yorkshire moor that lost the king the north (2 July 1644)
Cromwell's cavalry — his 'Ironsides' — made their name here
The New Model Army under Fairfax and Cromwell destroying the royal field army in Northamptonshire (14 June 1645)
The king's captured correspondence, showing he had sought Irish and foreign help, was published as The King's Cabinet Opened
Colonel Pride at the door of the Commons with a list, leaving only a Rump (6 December 1648)
A scaffold outside the Banqueting House on a freezing January morning (30 January 1649)
Charles I wore two shirts so he would not shiver and seem afraid
The 'crowning mercy' at Worcester, exactly nine years after Dunbar (3 September 1651)
Charles II escaped, famously hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel
Quick-fire facts
- •The wars are usually counted as three: 1642–46, 1648–49 and 1649–51
- •Royalists were nicknamed Cavaliers, from caballeros; parliamentarians Roundheads, from the cropped hair of London apprentices
- •The New Model Army was created in 1645 under Sir Thomas Fairfax, with Oliver Cromwell as Lieutenant-General of Horse
- •Charles I was tried by a High Court of Justice at Westminster Hall and beheaded outside the Banqueting House on 30 January 1649
- •He called himself 'the martyr of the people'; Cromwell is said, on an unreliable report, to have looked at the coffin and murmured 'cruel necessity'
- •The monarchy and House of Lords were abolished in 1649 and the Commonwealth declared; Cromwell became Lord Protector in 1653
- •No treaty ended it — the war ended in conquest, and the settlement came only with the Declaration of Breda and the Restoration of Charles II in 1660
- •In 1661 Cromwell's body was exhumed and posthumously executed; his head was displayed on Westminster Hall for decades
- •Radical groups thrown up by the conflict include the Levellers, the Diggers and the Fifth Monarchists
- •Proportionally, the wars may have killed a larger share of the population of the British Isles than the First World War
Drill it — 10 cards
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Sources
- Encyclopaedia Britannica — English Civil Wars
- Blair Worden — The English Civil Wars, 1640–1660