Warlord Games English
Civil Wars 1642-1652 Montrose Irish.
Catastrophe came about in 1637. King Charles I’s
determination to enforce uniformity on his churches led him to strengthen the
episcopal element in the kirk. At his much-delayed coronation in Scotland in
1633 he insisted that the Scottish bishops ape the English bishops he had
brought with him. Moreover, the Englishmen were given precedence. To follow
through this instruction in superiority, the king had his Scottish bishops
draft a liturgy, a prayer book modelled on the alien English Book of Common
Prayer. On 23 July 1637, this book was ready and was to be read from pulpits
across Scotland. At St Giles, Edinburgh, the congregation was furious—to them
this was a foreign doctrine at best, it was English at worst, and appeared to
be popish. Folding stools were hurled at the dean. Crowds outside hammered on
the doors. Across Scotland, ministers were attacked and churches stormed by
angry men and women.
Charles’s response was to treat this as an unwarranted
rebellion. Even his loyal minister, the earl of Traquair, tried to convince him
that the prayer book was a mistake, but to little avail. The Scottish council
was packed with Charles’s appointees, men with little personal authority or
experience of government, there because Charles expected their elevation to
power would ensure loyalty. As a result they had little sway with the wider
political world and less with the Scottish people. Even if inexperienced in
executive government, many had been wise enough to stay away from St Giles that
Sunday, to avoid trouble and being associated with the prayer book.
As riots occurred across Scotland, members of the Council
discussed the matter with leading opponents of the prayer book. Charles’s
refusal to discuss the matter in any meaningful way drove opponents to present
him with a Supplication and Complaint in October 1637, which put the blame on
the Scottish bishops. Charles reacted by threatening to arrest the supplicants,
and hoped to end criticism by claiming direct responsibility for the prayer
book; he believed that they would shy away from attacking the monarch. Instead,
by February 1638, a National Covenant had been drafted. This Covenant was a
reference to the 1581 Confession of Faith, which bound Scotsmen and women and
James VI together in defence of the kirk. The Covenant went further, asserting
that the religious changes imposed by James VI and Charles I were illegal
because they contravened the basis of the kirk. The National Covenant was first
signed at Edinburgh and then circulated throughout Scotland for men and women
to sign at their own church doors.
The Covenanters demanded a General Assembly and Charles
acceded, expecting his agents to be able to influence the choice of
representatives. He even ordered that the General Assembly should meet at
Glasgow, that he thought would circumvent opposition. Charles was hopelessly
out of touch and his agents were not in control. The General Assembly, which
met in November 1638, rejected the prayer book and abolished the office of
bishop. The king’s commissioner, the marquis of Hamilton, Traquair’s
replacement, failed to influence the assembly, and when he attempted to end the
session by storming out he ran into a locked door. Even after Hamilton had
managed to leave, the debates continued. Charles’s reaction to his loss of
control and influence was to prepare for war against his rebellious subjects.
By May 1639 an English and Welsh army gathered at the
border. Elaborate plans for amphibious landings on the Scottish coast were
drawn up and Hamilton prepared a fleet. In Ireland, where there was support for
the Covenanters amongst the Presbyterian ministers in Ulster, Lord Deputy
Wentworth imposed a series of oaths aimed at forcing Scots settlers to abjure
the Covenant. At the same time, the marquis of Antrim, chief of the Clan
MacDonald (known as MacDonnell in Ireland), proposed to take advantage of the
situation. He offered to raise a clan army to invade western Scotland where his
lost ancestral estates were situated and controlled by the Campbells. The
Campbells, although led by the marquis of Argyll, a supporter of the king, were
also associated with the Covenant through Argyll’s heir, Lord Lorne. Wentworth
suspected Antrim’s motive and rejected the plan, preparing an Irish army
instead, with Protestant officers and Catholic soldiers.
The first Bishop’s War in 1639 was short. The amphibious
landings were abandoned. Attempts to land at Aberdeen were called off when the
earl of Montrose and a Covenanter Army captured the town. At the eastern border
on 4 June, a section of the king’s army was defeated in a skirmish near Kelso.
This became something of a rout, and in its wake the Covenanters put forwards
proposals for discussions. That summer a truce, the Pacification of Berwick,
was negotiated, but all the while Charles I planned for war.
A new General Assembly of the kirk met in August and
confirmed its predecessor’s work. Later that same month the Estates also
assembled, and they too confirmed the actions of the General Assembly. The
Estates had been effectively controlled by Covenanters who had minimised the
role of the king in influencing the selections of members, and steps were taken
towards further controlling the business of the sessions. By the beginning of
1640, both the king and the Covenanters were preparing for renewed war.
Charles sought to improve the financial support for his
government and war effort. He planned a two-pronged approach. Wentworth
summoned a Parliament in Dublin, that he expected to manipulate into voting
four subsidies for the king. In April a Parliament would meet at Westminster
and was expected to follow suit. In March 1640 the Dublin Parliament met and
all went according to plan, but the Westminster Parliament refused to discuss
finance unless a series of grievances was addressed. The grievances were bound
up with the collection of taxation in the 1630s, religious issues, and the way
in that the 1629 Parliament had been closed. When he failed to influence the
Parliament at all, Charles dissolved it on 5 May.
Plans for war went forward, but opposition to the king had
developed in the wake of the Parliament. Soldiers mustered for the army went on
the rampage, destroying altar rails and religious images, and people across the
country began to refuse to pay taxation. Support for the Scots was to be found
across England, where people who objected to the religious reforms of
Archbishop Laud refused to pay for them to be imposed in Scotland. In Ireland,
many Scots in Ulster refused Wentworth’s oaths and left the country, leaving
tracts of countryside untilled.
The war in the summer of 1640 saw the defeat of the king’s
army at the Battle of Newburn and the occupation of northern England by the
Covenanter Army. This time peace negotiations were conducted on the Scots’
terms. They demanded freedom for the kirk, but also wanted a Parliament at
Westminster to confirm the terms. This gelled with calls within England and
Wales for a new Parliament. With an army in occupation for that he was to
provide pay, the king had no option but to accede. Parliament met on 3 November
and the king’s few supporters were overwhelmed.
Three Parliaments now worked in opposition to the king. The
Dublin Parliament had met in the summer and began to unravel the financial
arrangements it had put in place in March. It then went on to question the
relationship between itself and the lord deputy and even questioned its
subordination to the Privy Council in London. Moreover, Irish and Scots
politicians presented evidence about Wentworth’s government of Ireland and his
planned invasion of Scotland. This was taken up by Westminster and in November
Wentworth, now known as the earl of Strafford, was impeached and imprisoned
along with Archbishop Laud.
As the Dublin Parliament began to deconstruct the government
in Ireland, the Estates began to reduce the power of the king in Scottish
government. The Westminster Parliament began to take apart the machinery of
government that had sustained the Personal Rule. As well as impeaching
Strafford and Laud, Parliament aimed its ire at ministers Lord Finch and
Francis Windebank, who both fled to France to escape. Ship Money was abolished
and forest fines were banned. Two acts prevented another period of Personal
Rule: One established that there should be Parliaments at least every three
years; the other made it impossible for Parliament to be dissolved without its
own consent. In May 1641, against the background of a plot hatched amongst some
of the king’s army officers, Strafford was executed. This effectively settled
the issues raised by the Personal Rule, but Parliament presented the king with
Ten Propositions demanding a further role in government by having the right to
nominate ministers and to have a say in foreign policy.
The king went to Scotland in the summer months of 1641 to
ratify the Treaty of London, which had ended the war, and also to ratify the
acts passed in the Estates, which diminished his role in Scottish government.
The Estates had passed a series of measures that had been the inspiration for
the Westminster Parliament’s work during the spring. Charles also harboured
hopes of nurturing a royalist party in Scotland that could overthrow the
Covenanter government. The earl of Montrose, the Covenanter general, had become
disillusioned with the Covenanter cause and had questioned the ambitions of the
earl of Argyll (formerly Lord Lorne). By the time Charles went to Edinburgh,
however, Montrose was imprisoned. An attempted coup d’état, known as the
Incident, was exposed and Charles became implicated in it. With his attempts to
overturn the Covenanter government in tatters, the king returned to London.
Within days of his arrival news broke of a rebellion in Ireland.
The Irish Rebellion
In the wake of the successes at Edinburgh and Westminster,
Catholic Irish and long-established English settler families began to press for
similar changes at home. Autonomy for the Dublin Parliament was one aim, but
others related to religious issues and the tenure rights of the Catholic
population. Rights to practice their religion openly was a major demand and the
king had tentatively suggested that it might be possible. The Catholic
population too had insecure tenure on their estates having never been granted firm
property rights because of their religion. These two issues were bound together
and known as the Graces.
Given the king’s powerlessness, the Irish felt able to press
their cause. Although the Scots had secured the safety of the kirk, however,
and the Welsh and English had freed themselves from Laud’s reforms, religious
rights for Catholics were not acceptable to the Protestant Parliaments in
Edinburgh and Westminster. Frustrated groups began to discuss the possibility
of a rising in Ireland, and exiled Irishmen became involved in these
discussions. By October the discussions had crystallised into a plan to seize
strongholds throughout Ulster and Dublin Castle.
On 22 October rebellion broke out, but although the forts in
Ulster were captured by Sir Phelim O’Neill and others, Dublin remained in
government hands. By November, rebellion had spread throughout Ireland and the
Old English settlers had joined with the Catholic Irish rebels. The government
forces managed to hold onto pockets around the Irish coast, but supplies and
reinforcements were necessary if there was any possibility of remaining there.
In Edinburgh and Westminster the governments began to discuss military and
financial plans for reconquering Ireland. Whilst King Charles outwardly
discussed these issues with the Westminster Parliament, he also plotted to
seize prominent leaders. Charles was assured that there was now a significant
group of M.P.s who supported him rather than his opponents.
In late November, after heated debate, Parliament had passed
the Grand Remonstrance. This was a sort of petition that had set out the evils
of the 1630s and the remedies that had been applied; finally, the remonstrance
proposed further reforms. No sooner was this passed by the Commons than it was
published. This broadcasting of Parliament’s position was disliked by many
M.P.s. Christmastide 1641 was a period of riots in London and Westminster by
mobs supporting the aims of the Grand Remonstrance, and in particular the
removal of the bishops from the House of Lords in a move similar to the
exclusion of bishops from Scottish government. On 5 January Charles marched
into Westminster to arrest five leading M.P.s and Lord Mandeville. This coup
d’état, like that in Scotland the previous October, failed (the proposed victims
had fled), and it provoked continued rioting that in turn drove the king and
his family out of the capital.
Over the next months Charles and Parliament grew further
estranged, agreeing only on the need to fund the war against the Irish rebels.
The raising of an army to fight in Ireland drove the final wedge between the
king and Parliament, however. It was felt that the king, implicated in an army
plot and two coup d’états, could not be trusted if given the military command.
He suggested he would have to go to Ireland, especially as the rebels there
claimed to have the king’s warrant for their rebellion. With the Militia
Ordinance, Parliament took away the king’s military powers in March. In April
the king responded by trying to seize the arsenal deposited at Hull during the
Bishop’s War. He was denied entry into the city. In May Charles began the
recreation of obsolete county-based commissions of array to regain control of
the Trained Bands. Throughout the summer of 1642 both he and Parliament battled
to raise armies, each hoping to overawe the other.
In Ireland the war had taken two turns of fortune. Money and
troops had begun arriving in the spring. The marquis of Ormond took command of
the English forces and began to make inroads into rebel territory in Leinster
province. In eastern Ulster a Scottish army landed and took control of the
region in May. As summer drew on, however, attention in England had turned
inwards and the supply of resources to Ireland dried up as king and Parliament
commandeered the money for their own use. War broke out in England and Wales in
August.
Wars and Civil Wars,
1641–1653
War raged in the four nations for the next 11 years: In
Ireland there was a constant state of war; in the other three nations war was
more sporadic. Each war impinged on the others and all were closely related to
the needs of Charles I, who sought to offset failure in one nation with success
and resources from at least one of the others.
In England and Wales, the war that broke out in August 1642
began as both sides, royalists and parliamentarians, assembled field armies,
first, to try and overawe their enemy, and then, second, to inflict military
defeat in one cataclysmic battle. Neither scenario was to be enacted. By
October the king had moved from his initial musters in the North Midlands
towards London, whilst Parliament’s commander in chief, the earl of Essex,
moved westwards from the East Midlands to stop him. Scouting techniques were so
underdeveloped that the king got between the earl and London, and then the two
armies bumped into each other whilst searching for quarters. On 23 October
1643, the first major battle of the war in England took place at Edgehill.
Partly due to the inexperience within the two armies, the battle was drawn and
the war had to take on a new complexion.
After the king failed to press his attack on London in
mid-November, both sides now began a fight for territory and the resources to
maintain a nationwide war. The winter was spent in regional battles as local
commanders began to seize castles and towns in that to establish garrisons. By
the spring, the king controlled much of the south-west and north-east of
England and had a significant presence in both the North and South Midlands.
The royalists also held onto the vast majority of Wales. Parliament controlled
all major ports, the south-east and the Lancashire and Cheshire area, as well
as significant Midland areas of England, and a good proportion of Pembrokeshire
in Wales. The king believed himself to be in a strong position within the
country and as such did not take the opportunity to negotiate the end of the
war, which arose in spring 1643.
Attempts to dislodge the royalists from their strongholds in
the north, the south-west, and the South Midlands failed in the summer of 1643.
In the south-west, parliamentarian general Sir William Waller, who had met with
great success at the end of 1642, was defeated at Rowton Down in July. The earl
of Essex’s attempt to capture Oxford was curtailed in June, and that same month
the earl of Newcastle defeated the Yorkshire parliamentarians Lord Fairfax and
his son, Sir Thomas, and bottled them up in Hull. Both Parliament and the king
sought outside help at this point. At first, Scotland remained aloof from the
conflict in England and Wales. The Covenanters had offered to act as mediator
but the king had rejected their approach. The leading parliamentarian, John
Pym, had exploited the Scots’ fear of the Catholic forces in Ireland. He
suggested that the king was negotiating with the Irish, and that there might be
Irish landings on the Scottish coast as a result of such discussions. He also
hinted that if the king, who appeared to have the upper hand in England and
Wales, were to win, then he might turn on Scotland.
The Development of
the Wars
In Ireland, stalemate had developed after the funding from
across the Irish sea had dried up. The English and Scots forces held
significant areas of territory in Ulster (in Down and Antrim), around Dublin in
Leinster, and around Cork and Youghal in Munster. There were also a few
garrisons in Connacht held by the English. The Irish meanwhile had unified
their forces and their administration. Provincial armies had been created from
the disparate forces and generals appointed. A government was formed with an
executive, the Supreme Council, and a legislative, the General Assembly, which
consisted of elected representatives of the shires and boroughs. Each county
had a council of its own that sent representatives to provincial assemblies.
Despite this organisation, resources were few and the Catholic Confederation of
Kilkenny was unable to defeat the English or Scottish garrisons and armies.
Negotiations with the English began in 1643, with the aim of
getting royal recognition for the Catholic religion and for the property rights
of the Catholic peoples. The king’s representative, the earl of Ormond, was
unwilling to make major concessions, but by September at least a cease-fire had
been arranged. This Cessation allowed for the return home of the English forces
sent to Ireland in 1642, and these men were co-opted as royalist forces. This
in turn enabled Pym to show the Scots that he had been right about the
suspected negotiations, and the Scots became convinced of the need to join the
Westminster Parliament against the king. In 16 January 1644 the Army of the
Solemn League and Covenant, named after the treaty between Edinburgh and
Westminster, invaded north-east England. The English and Welsh people under the
control of Parliament would fund the invading army and there would be
consideration given to the creation of a Presbyterian church in England and
Wales.
Even before the Scots crossed the border, the war had taken
a different complexion. In September three royalist armies were weakened by
fruitless attempts to capture the prominent parliamentarian strongholds of
Hull, Gloucester, and Plymouth. Failure to capture any of them had wasted
resources and reduced the numbers of effective soldiers through disease and
injury. It took time to assemble the forces necessary to hold back the Scots,
and in the end it was fruitless—defeat at the Battle of Selby on 11 April led
to the collapse of the royalist hold on the north. The marquis of Newcastle and
his once powerful army became bottled up in York. Royalist attempts to encroach
on south-east England came to an end in the spring. Yet Parliament’s attempt to
capture Oxford again failed and a series of campaigns followed in that both Sir
William Waller and the earl of Essex were defeated by the king. Waller’s army
had been caught in Oxfordshire and destroyed. Essex had marched off into
royalist territory in the far west only to be trapped and defeated at Lostwithiel
in Cornwall at the beginning of September. On 2 July, the Northern Army and a
rescue force led to its aid by Prince Rupert were defeated at Marston moor near
York. With this defeat the royalists lost control of the north.
The king’s victories in the south, and the failure of three
combined parliamentarian armies to defeat him in the fall, temporarily offset
the loss of the north. It also led to a false confidence that led some
royalists to ridicule Parliament’s reorganisation of its war effort and the
creation of one field army from the three assembled in the autumn. This New
Model Army was created in early 1645, and in June it defeated the king at
Naseby and then set about conquering the south-west. Together, it and the
Northern Association Army won the war during the summer of 1645. During the
ensuing autumn and winter the New Model and local forces ended royalist
resistance in the south of England, whilst the Northern Association forces and
the Scots cleared the north and North Midlands of major royalist strongholds.
In Wales, Welsh parliamentarians cleared the south of the country whilst
Lancashire and Cheshire parliamentarians captured central and northern royalist
strongholds.
Fighting had broken out in Scotland during 1644. Alasdair
MacColla had led a force of Irish and Highland troops from Ireland to the
Western Isles in July 1644. The Catholic Confederation hoped that this force
would oblige the Scots to withdraw forces from Ulster; the marquis of Ormond,
who lent support to the expedition, hoped that the Scots would withdraw forces
from England. MacColla, who was of the MacDonald clan, probably hoped for both,
but also had an eye for regaining clan land lost to the Campbells. In August
1644 MacColla was joined by the earl of Montrose, by now a fully fledged
royalist. Montrose had a commission to raise the loyal Scots against the
Covenanter government. Together, the two commanders embarked on a campaign that
over the next year saw them defeat all the home armies the Edinburgh government
sent against them. At Kilsyth, on 15 August 1645, Montrose defeated the last of
these armies and Scotland appeared to be his to command. He summoned the
Estates to Glasgow and began to receive tributes from politicians. Ironically,
it was to be one of the early aims of the war that was to defeat Montrose. A
section of the Army of the Solemn League and Covenant did leave England. On 13
September David Leslie and a section of the Scots Horse caught Montrose’s men
at Philliphaugh and destroyed them. The month-old royalist domination of
Scotland was over: But guerrilla warfare was to continue in the country until
1647.
In Ireland, the king had sought a treaty not because he was
able to accept any of the Confederation’s demands, but because he needed their
military help. Ormond, part of the Protestant group that hitherto controlled
Ireland’s political world, was unwilling personally to accept the freedom
Catholics wanted for their faith. Charles sought to circumvent him by sending
the earl of Glamorgan, a Welsh Catholic, to negotiate secretly with the
Confederation. Glamorgan’s terms were more acceptable at Kilkenny, but a papal
representative, Giovanni Battista Rinuccini, arrived just before the terms were
agreed. He was wary about the secret nature of the discussions and urged
holding out for public acknowledgement. Before he could renegotiate the treaty
personally with Glamorgan, a copy of the secret treaty fell into enemy hands.
Upon the Westminster Parliament’s horrified publication of the terms, Charles I
repudiated them and Ormond arrested Glamorgan.
