← Not Just the Tudors
Not Just the Tudors
Oliver Cromwell v. Charles I
00:41:25
From the Battle of Naseby to regicide, Prof. Suzannah Lipscomb concludes the story of the English Civil Wars.
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Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own recent two part series A World Torn, the Dissolution of the Monasteries and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com forward/subscribe.
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Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots to from Shakespeare to samurais, relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. January 30, 1649 Outside the banqueting house in Whitehall, London, a crowd of thousands stands in stunned silence as a condemned man approaches a wooden scaffold. He wears two shirts, not out of vanity, but to prevent the winter cold from making him shiver because it might be interpreted as fear. This prisoner though, is no ordinary condemned felon. This is Charles, by the grace of God, King of England, Scotland and Ireland. And in a matter of moments the King would take his last breath as the executioner raised his axe. How did England arrive at this unprecedented moment in its history? How did a kingdom that had believed in the divine right of kings come to put their own monarch on trial for treason? In the last episode of Not Just the Tudors, we explored how Charles had embraced his divine right to rule with fatal conviction. When Parliament refused to grant him traditional subsidies, Charles bypassed it entirely, levying forced loans and newly expanded taxes. But perhaps Charles most provocative act was religious. Married to the Catholic Henrietta Maria of France, he attempted to impose Anglican prayer books on Presbyterian Scotland. The Scots saw this as religious tyranny and they were willing to fight the bishops wars of 1639 and 1640. The first of the wars of the Three Kingdoms drained Charles treasury and forced him to recall Parliament, the very institution he had tried to govern without. And within two years, the tensions that had been simmering for over a decade erupted into open conflict. The turning point of the first English Civil war occurred on 2 July 1644 at Marston Moor in Yorkshire, the largest battle of the entire conflict, which resulted in 4,000 royalist casualties compared to no more than 300 parliamentarian losses. At the centre of the Parliamentary line rode a man who'd be part of a cohort, who would do the unthinkable, kill the King and turn Britain into a republic. Oliver Cromwell. But before we get to that seismic shift, let's rewind four years as the disciplined New Model army of the Parliamentarians was put to the decisive test at the Battle of Naseby. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb, and with the help of some brilliant expert historians, drawn from episodes in the Not Just the Tudors archive, I'll now bring the story of the English Civil wars to their dramatic climax. At dawn on 14 June 1645, the fate of Britain was hanging in the balance. Two armies converged upon the misty moorlands of Northamptonshire. King Charles's beleaguered Cavaliers were gravely weakened. Charles had committed the fatal error of dividing his forces, dispatching 3,000 precious cavalry to the west country, leaving his main force dangerously outnumbered. His commanders, chosen more for their noble blood than their battlefield prowess, were at odds with each other. The King's brilliant but headstrong nephew, Prince Rupert, had counselled against giving battle, sensing the trap that was closing around them. Yet Charles, driven by pride and the indignity of being pursued like a common fugitive, overruled his most experienced general. The King's desperate gambit, the brutal storming of Leicester on 31 May had succeeded in drawing Parliament's New Model army away from Oxford. But now that same professional force was bearing down upon him across the field. The New Model army deployed with the cold precision of England's first truly professional military force. Almost 15,000 strong, these red coated soldiers were a revolutionary departure from the amateur militias that had stumbled through the Civil War's early years. Under the steely gaze of Oliver Cromwell, the Parliamentary cavalry took their positions on the ridge, while disciplined ranks of pikemen and musketeers stretched nearly two miles across the battlefield. Sensing their numerical disadvantage, the Royalists drew up on lower ground with their backs to Solby Hedges. Prince Rupert's cavalry massed on their right flank, poised to unleash one final desperate charge. As the morning fog began to lift, revealing the size of the forces arrayed against him, Charles faced perhaps the bleakest odds of his reign. A professional army twice the size of his own, commanded by generals who had learned from every previous defeat and stood between him and any hope of victory. Suddenly, spurred by Rupert's impatience and the crackle of Parliamentarian muskets from the hedgerows, the Royalist cavalry surged forward. The charge smashed through the Parliamentarian left, scattering horsemen and tearing into the baggage train beyond. For a heartbeat, it seemed the Cavaliers might sweep the field. But in the center, the battle quickly turned into a brutal melee. Pike and musket, flesh and steel, men grappling in the mud. And the Parliamentarian infantry, drilled and resolute, began a relentless push to grind down their Royalist counterparts. On the Parliamentarian right. Cromwell's cavalry thundered into the Royalist flank. The Royalist left buckled, then broke, the Parliamentarian horse, wheeling and crashing into the exposed Royalist centre. Charles himself tried to rally his lifeguard for a desperate counter attack, only to be physically restrained by his own men, the reality of imminent defeat dawning as his army crumbled around him. Rupert's cavalry, having squandered their momentum on the baggage train, returned too late to stem the tide. The Royalist infantry, surrounded and exhausted, were cut down or forced to surrender en masse. The route was merciless. Royalist fugitives fled north beyond the battlefield, many of them cut down in the fields and villages. More than a thousand Royalists lay dead, with a further 4,500 taken prisoner. By comparison, Parliament's losses were minimal. The King's private papers, seized in the aftermath, exposed his desperate intrigues and doomed hopes. The Royalist cause was shattered at Naseby, the heart of their army broken, their dreams of victory drowned in mud and blood on that fateful June morning. And at Naseby, Oliver Cromwell's skills were evident for all to see, displaying not only tactical brilliance but also iron restraint. His cavalry's ability to regroup after their initial charge and return to the main battle was the decisive factor, contrasting sharply with the Royalist horse's lack of contrast control. Cromwell's innovations, close order formations, relentless pursuit of the enemy and the refusal to allow his men to scatter turned the tide of the battle and cemented his reputation as one of the era's great commanders.
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We know that Oliver Cromwell is a very effective military commander and increasingly, people in the New Model army, including especially the infantry, felt safe with Oliver Cromwell.
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Professor Ian Gentles.
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They knew, and he established this very early, that he would take care of them, he would make sure that they were properly fed, properly paid properly clothed, and that he wouldn't needlessly risk their lives in battle. He always took his time in preparing for a battle. He never rushed headlong into a battle. He would sometimes wait for days or even weeks, and until he had all the money, all the boots, for example, when he was on the way to meet the king in 1648, in the Second Civil War, he waited several days at Northamptonshire until the shoemakers of Northamptonshire had fully shod his men. He didn't want them going into battle with worn through boots. That's an illustration of how well he took care of his men. And because he took care of his men, they felt safe with him.
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The consequences of the Battle of Naseby were immediate and catastrophic for the Royalists. But for King Charles, the true ordeal had only begun. His cause had crumbled. His last stronghold at Oxford became a gilded cage, besieged and suffocating. By the spring of 1646, Charles had to face the bitter truth that the war was lost and his crown hung by a thread. In desperation, he slipped out of Oxford in disguise, a monarch reduced to subterfuge, riding through the night with only a handful of loyal companions. The journey was fraught with peril and uncertainty. Stretching more than 200 miles into hostile territory, his only hope now lay with the Scottish Covenanters besieging Newark, a hope tinged with irony, for they were formerly his foes. On 5 May 1646, Charles rode into the Scottish camp at Southwell, not as a sovereign, but as a supplicant. He gambled his fate on the mercy of the Scots Covenanters, believing he could play upon the divisions between the Presbyterians and the English Parliamentarians. There, under the wary eyes of General David Leslie, Charles agreed to order the surrender of Newark, but refused to yield on matters of faith and royal prerogative. It was a dangerous game and it failed. The Scots, seeing the King as a bargaining chip, held him under house arrest and soon marched him north to Newcastle. After extracting a hefty payment from Parliament, the Scots handed the King over to his enemies in early 1647. Now the pressure was on to bring the King to justice. Professor Ian Gentles. Again.
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As early as 1647, certain officers like Colonel Thomas Harrison were beginning to refer to Charles I as that man of blood. Now, that is a phrase heavy with significance. What does it mean when you say that the King is a man of blood? That means that you think you believe profoundly that the King is responsible for the blood that has been shed in the Civil War. It's his Fault. If he hadn't been an absolutist king, if he hadn't violated the laws of England so brazenly, if he hadn't provoked the a civil war, none of this bloodshed would have happened. It's all his fault. He's a man of blood. Well, what should the punishment be for a man of blood? Well, the answer is in the Bible. He who commits murder, you shall not suffer him to live. The King is guilty of treason, he's guilty of murder, and therefore he has forfeited his right to live. More and more officers in the army are saying that from 1647 onwards, when the king, having been soundly defeated in 1646, then plots with the Scots, who have switched sides because they're so afraid of the radicalism that they see in the New Model army, and joins the King and he feels confident that he can now launch another civil war and win it. And so the New Model army has to take up arms again and go and beat the King a second time. And they are very embittered by this because they've won, won fair and square, and now they have to risk their lives again. And they're very conscious of having to risk their lives a second time. And so they are very, very angry with the King. And this is when the petitions start flooding in from one regiment after another into headquarters, demanding that the King be brought to justice. Now, they don't say that the King be executed, they say he should be held account for his treason. They accuse him of treason. What's the penalty of treason? The penalty is death. What's the penalty for murder? Capital punishment. So it's quite clear, for a time.
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The King was held under house arrest at Hampton Court Palace. But Charles was always the schemer. On the night of 11 November 1647, he slipped his guards and fled again seeking refuge and perhaps a fresh start. He arrived at Titchfield Abbey in Hampshire, from where he contacted Colonel Robert Hammond, the parliamentarian governor of the Isle of Wight. Believing Hammond to be sympathetic, Charles asked to be allowed to stay on the island. Thus he crossed the Solent and was installed at carisbrooke Castle on 22 November 1647. At first, captivity on the Isle of Wight was not harsh. Charles enjoyed the finest rooms, rode out in his coach and even had a bowling green created for his amusement. But Charles was refusing to give up his hopes of being restored to power. He negotiated with commissioners from both the English and Scottish Parliaments, seeking a political settlement.
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Charles really plays a sort of game of shopping around with his opponents, of trying to find the best possible peace terms.
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Professor Ted Vallance first of all, he.
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Surrenders himself to the Scots Covenanters because he thinks they're the most likely to give him generous peace terms. That doesn't work for him. So he then is passed over to Parliament. He tries to negotiate with Parliament. That doesn't work. He's taken out of parliamentary custody by the army. He negotiates with the army, that doesn't come to meaningful fruition.
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Secretly, Charles then struck a deal with a faction of the Scots known as the Engagers. In return for their military support, Charles promised to establish Presbyterianism in England for three years. This pact, known as the Engagement, was a desperate gamble, one last throw of the dice for a king who had lost almost everything.
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He again goes back to negotiating with bits of the Covenant regime that we know as the Engagers, because they enter into this engagement with Charles the first. So he's basically shopping around for two or so years after the end of the first Civil war, different parties, both trying to get the best possible peace terms out of things, but also, it seems really playing for time in the hope that at some point all of these different factions are going to fall apart amongst themselves, or there'll be an opportunity as eventually presents itself to him in late 1647, which is for him to enter into some sort of military agreement to effectively recover his authority. Authority without having to negotiate significant concessions in terms of his own power.
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Meanwhile, Parliament was riven by its own divisions. The new mortal army, Oliver Cromwell's formidable force that had won the first Civil war, was growing ever more restless and more radical. Parliament's failure to pay and disband the army had alienated many of its soldiers. And the King hoped to exploit these divisions. In the spring of 1648, the powder keg exploded. Royalist uprisings erupted in Kent, Essex, South Wales, the north of England. Mutinies broke out in Parliamentarian garrisons. Six warships defected to the Royalist cause. The kingdom was once again ablaze with rebellion. In Kent, Royalists seized Maidstone, only to be crushed by Sir Thomas Fairfax at the Battle of Maidston on 1 June. In Essex, Royalists retreated to Colchester, enduring an 11 week siege by Fairfax's forces. In South Wales, mutinous Parliamentarian troops joined the Royalist cause. Colonel Thomas Horton defeated the rebels at St Fagans on 8 May and Oliver Cromwell himself laid siege to Pembroke Castle, which finally surrendered on 11 July after a brutal two month siege. In the north, Major General John Lambert contained Royalist uprisings and shadowed the advancing Scots. The Engagers, meanwhile, led by James, Duke of Hamilton, raised a Scottish army to invade England and restore Charles to the throne. On 8 July 1648. Hamilton's force, eventually numbering around 10,000 men, crossed into England near Carlisle, linking up with English Royalists under Marmaduke Langdale and Irish veterans under George Monro. But the invasion was plagued by delays, poor coordination and terrible weather. The Royalist and Scottish forces were scattered over a wide area of. Unable to unite effectively, Lambert's parliamentarian cavalry harried their flanks, buying precious time for Cromwell to finish the siege of Pembroke and move north with astonishing speed. After the fall of Pembroke, he gathered his New Model army, ragged, unpaid, but battle hardened, and raced through the rain soaked Midlands, picking up reinforcements and supplies as they went. On 12 August 1618 48, Cromwell reached Wetherby. Lambert was at Otley, Langdale was at Skipton and Gargave, Hamilton at Lancaster and Monroe at Hornby. The stage was set for the final showdown. From the 17th to the 19th of August, the fields around Preston in Lancashire became a charnel house. Cromwell's 8,600 men, outnumbered but united, struck the scattered Royalist Scottish army. Langdale's advanced guard was overwhelmed. After four hours of savage fighting, the Parliamentarians pressed on, driving the enemy across the Ribble and pursuing them relentlessly through Wigan and Windwick to Ashbourne. Rain drenched the soldiers, ammunition was ruined and discipline collapsed. Finally, Hamilton's army, hungry, exhausted and demoralized, surrendered. The Royalist fatalities were staggering 2,000 killed plus 9,000 captured. The New Model army, by contrast, lost perhaps 100 men. The battle of Preston was not merely a defeat, it was a catastrophe for the Royalist cause. The Scottish threat was crushed and the last Charles Restoration by force was extinguished. While the main drama played out in England, Scotland and Ireland were also in turmoil. In Scotland, the Engagers defeat at Preston led to a collapse of Royalist hopes. The Covenanters, who had once allied with Parliament, now found themselves isolated and divided. In Ireland, the Confederate wars raged on, but Cromwell's brutal campaign would only begin the following year, after the execution of the King, throughout the chaos of 1648, Charles remained a prisoner on the Isle of Wight, his hopes pinned on the success of the Scottish invasion. Twice he attempted to escape, once famously getting stuck in the bars of his window, an ignominious failure that only tightened his captor's vigilance. Charles secret dealings with the Scots, once revealed, destroyed any remaining trust that Parliament had in him and negotiations broke down completely. On 6 September 1648, Charles was moved from Carisbrooke to Newport and then to Hurst Castle on the mainland. As Parliament prepared to decide his fate, the New Model army, now the most powerful force in England, had lost all patience with the King, Professor Ronald Hutton.
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They blame him for the fact this war is happening at all and are determined to put him on trial for his life at the end of it. So the army commences a rhinoceros like charge through the English constitution to try and nail the King. And first of all the House of Lords has to go because it won't endorse this.
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On 6 December 1648, Colonel Pride purged Parliament of members sympathetic to Charles, leaving behind the so called rump Parliament, Professor Ian Gentles.
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The army were determined to bring him to the scaffold and they showed their determination in December of 1648, when Parliament was still being stubborn and insisting on continuing peace negotiations with the King. And the army were saying, what? How can you possibly negotiate with this man of blood, this man who has twice plunged the country into civil war? How can you possibly do that? And so on December 6th, 1648, they stood outside Parliament, Colonel Pride was in charge and they prevented anybody who supported negotiation with the King from entering the House of Commons. They thereby got rid of roughly two thirds of the House of Commons and the only people who were left in it, about a hundred or 125 at the most, were basically people who supported the army. So the army had created a purge House of Commons in its own image, a purged Parliament that was willing to do the army's will. And after that it they got Parliament to nominate a High Court of Justice, an unprecedented legal body, completely unconstitutional, completely revolutionary, to try the King for treason against the English people. Well, the crime of treason against the English people had never existed before. So you can see how revolutionary all this is.
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The majority of the House of Commons is purged because it won't agree to the army's desire to kill the King either. Professor Ronald Hutton and that leaves Parliament reduced to a minority of MPs. Actually just 50 or 60 of them out of the house of a few hundred who are prepared to try the King. Cromwell has nothing to do with the earlier parts of this process. He is in the north, besieging a royalist castle that's holding out. He arrives in London just after Parliament's been purged. He's very quiet for a couple of weeks, and then when it's clear that the King is going to be put on trial, he suddenly pushes forward into the limelight and becomes one of the leaders of the tribunal that kills the King. So again, he sees which way the wind is blowing, and then when he's certain that it's going that way, he rushes forward and seizes control again.
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The men who sought to bring Charles to trial faced an impossible paradox. How could a king be tried for treason when treason itself was defined as crimes against the king? Professor Ted Vallance.
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That was very problematic for them. And actually there are discussions before the court is set up in December of 1648, when Cromwell in particular is considering this, have meetings with leading lawyers where they're trying to get a kind of legal view about whether they can bring the King to trial. And uniformly, the kind of legal opinion is, no, they can't. There isn't a court that could try the King for treason, because the conception of treason is that it's actions or conceiving of actions that threaten the King's life and person and so on. How could the King be guilty of treason? Now, what those who are sort of at the trial do is that they're not trying to set up what we might describe as a kangaroo court. They're trying as hard as they can to establish something that has some sort of basis in, in legal precedent and contemporary legal frameworks. It is a kind of hybrid court. So it brings together elements of the English common law, it brings together elements of civil law procedure, it brings together elements of the way in which military courts and martial law procedure works to try and establish some sort of arena and procedure by which they can try Charles.
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On 20 January 1649, after preliminary preparations, formal proceedings against King Charles began at Westminster hall, the first time in history that a reigning monarch had been prosecuted by his subjects in a court of law. And surely Charles must have been mindful of the fate of his own grandmother, Mary Queen of scots, more than 60 years previously. Professor Claire Jackson.
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If anything, he's learned from his grandmother's trial. I mean, Charles absolutely refuses to cooperate with the high Court that is established to try him. He refuses to enter a plea In a sense, Mary had valiantly rejected the right of English ministers to try her, but it was done behind closed doors. And eventually she sort of went along with it and sort of entered a plea and then was convicted. I mean, Charles has learned that this is probably not a sensible move. But Charles is most successful in at least shaping his posthumous reputation, which likewise becomes that of almost a sort of minor saint. And when we think of the images of icon Basiliki, Charles gains a huge amount of continental support. And it is often framed in the context of, you know, that the English nation is totally out of control.
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Charles refused to recognize the court's authority.
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Declaring, I would know by what power I am called hither.
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Charles maintained that his authority came from God, not from his subjects, and no earthly court could judge him.
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I do stand more for the liberty of my people than any here that come to be my pretended judges.
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Time and again, the commissioners attempted to persuade Charles to plead one way or the other so the trial could proceed properly. His stubborn refusal stemmed from his 10 temperamental inability to bow to what he saw as the authority of terrible rebels. Despite Charles's refusal to participate, the court had assembled a damning case against him. Professor Ted Valance.
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In the charges that are brought against the king, they are essentially focusing upon what we might now describe as being war crimes and the idea of command responsibility. So the charges almost exclusively relate to what happened during the first Civil War. They argue that Charles initiated the war. They argue that Charles was present on the battlefield at various sort of major conflicts during the 1640s, basically urging on his troops, that he encouraged atrocities and abuses of not just combatants, but non combatants as well. So that presence of experts in military law is really important there, as well as that international dimension.
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33 witnesses were called to private sessions in front of the commissioners, who had gone to considerable efforts to secure evidence against Charles.
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We know that they actually issued public proclamations to try and get people to come to parliament to deliver evidence against the king. Although Vatican newsletters actually demonstrate there was a pretty poor response to those proclamations. It says that only one miserable independent soldier cobbler turned up in response to this proclamation. But there are lots of other witnesses where they are doing things like getting people from actually quite far away bits of the country to come specifically to London to deliver evidence against the King. There are many other witnesses as well who are actually also serving junior officers and soldiers within the New Model army who also appear as witnesses in the trial, too. And partly we could see this as a product of bias. These are people here who are parliamentarian soldiers. Some of them are actually what are described as agitators. So they are representatives of the rank and profile in the army. And some of them are also people who are signed up radicals, as it were, who have shown their sympathies to the democratic leveler movement. But they're also people who can give good evidence that the king was actually present on the battlefield because they were actually there too.
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The trial proceedings were reported with remarkable speed for the era. Shorthand note takers captured events in Westminster hall, and within a day or two, accounts of the trial appeared in printed newsbooks available to the public. This was justice performed in the full glare of public scrutiny. The weight of evidence combined with the trial's political purposes meant that Charles fate was sealed from the moment he refused to enter a plea. On 27 January 1649, the court found King Charles guilty and sentenced him to death as a tyrant, traitor, murderer and public enemy to the good people of this nation. 59 commissioners signed the death warrant by affixing their name to that document, these men, soon to be known as the Regicides, committed themselves to a course from which there could be no retreat. Three days passed. Charles spent the final morning of his life in prayer and bidding farewell to his younger children, Princess Elizabeth and Prince Henry. His eldest son, Charles, the future Charles ii, was already safely in exile.
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And so on 30 January 1649, at the appointed time, around 2 o' clock in the afternoon, Charles stepped out and onto the scaffold. Before him stretched a sea of faces. His subjects pressed together to witness the impossible. The King addressed the crowd briefly, maintaining to the end his belief in divine right and declaring himself a martyr of the people.
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I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible crown, where no disturbance can be no disturbance in the world.
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With one blow of the axe, the executioner severed the King's head from his body. One witness described how the blow was not met with a shout or cheer, but with a moan that came from the thousands of the King's subjects who saw in his death the end of the old order. News of Charles execution swept across the continent, horrifying European monarchs. The English had done what no people had ever dared to do before. They had condemned their King to death in a court of law. With Charles and the Royalist cause defeated, the monarchy and House of Lords were abolished and Oliver Cromwell emerged as the dominant figure, becoming lord protector on 16 December 1653. But there were immediate challenges facing his revolutionary experiment in the fading spirit. In the summer of 1651, Charles II, the exiled son of the executed king, seized upon Scottish support and crossed the border with a makeshift army determined to reclaim his father's throne. His hope was audacious march through hostile England, rouse royalist sentiment and ignite a new rebellion in the heart of the Commonwealth. On the 3rd of September, the Final act of this drama unfolded in Worcester. Charles, cornered and desperate, had fortified the town and awaited reinforcements that would never arrive. Cromwell, commanding a far superior force, some 28,000 veterans to Charles's 16,000, launched a relentless assault from both the east and west, cutting off every avenue of escape. Thunder rolled from the parliamentarian cannon, smoke choked the the air and hand to hand combat surged through the narrow streets and over the River Severn. Despite valiant resistance, royalist lines crumbled. Charles barely escaped with his life, beginning with a harrowing six week flight that would become the stuff of legend. The outcome was decisive and brutal. More than 3,000 Royalist soldiers lay dead and another 10,000 were captured. Worcester became a graveyard for Charles hopes. The New model army was once again victorious. And with the collapse of organized royalist resistance, Cromwell declared it a crowning mercy, the final crushing blow in the English civil wars. Charles ii, now a fugitive king with a price on his head, was forced into hiding, famously concealing himself in an oak tree at Boscobel before fleeing across the Channel to France. The failure of Charles II's invasion not only dashed the hopes of Loyalists across the country, but also cemented Cromwell's dominance as the most powerful man in England. The Battle of Worcester was not just the end of a campaign. It was the burial of a kingdom and the birth of a republic. The execution of King Charles was unprecedented. The monarchy abolished, and England became a republic. Under Cromwell's stern rule. The wars continued, and Ireland and Scotland would feel the iron hand of Cromwell's armies. Britain had been changed forever. While the monarchy was eventually restored, it never again regained absolute power. The notion of divine right to rule was effectively dead, replaced by a limited conception of monarchy answerable to Parliament and the law. The English Civil wars have been called the last of the wars of religion and the first of the wars of modern politics. They marked the painful transition from a medieval worldview centered on hierarchy and divine order to a more modern conception of society built on consent, representation, and constitutional limits on power. And yet, for some reason, the Civil wars have not always found a significant place in our national consciousness or history curricula.
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Jesse Charles, you could argue that because of the Restoration, because the republic ultimately failed and we had a king again, it wasn't quite the Revolution. In the same way that you can talk about the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution and that would be right. I think you can also say that Civil War wasn't so impactful and so contemporary in terms of relevance as, say, the American Civil War. I mean, you only have to look at the Gettysburg national park and compare it to Naseby Battlefield to see, you know, the different impacts they have on the national consciousness. And that would be right, too. But it doesn't really fully explain it because the Civil War did loom large with the Victorians, and it's only really quite recent that. That we've stopped talking about it. I think a lot of it is to do with the people who are in charge with what we study, whether it's the national curriculum at school, whether it's TV programs, whether it's movies even. There certainly used to be a bit of a sort of reticence about taking on the Civil War. Civil War doesn't sell, you know, we've all been told. So I think a bit like Field of Dreams. If you build it, they will come. I think especially now, the Civil War really, really matters because it is a time again, where of war in Europe and populism and puritanism and a polarizing new media and culture change, of course, climate change as well. The mid 17th century was the most intense phase of the Little Ice Age. So I think now is the time to have a look again at how all these movements can really cause global crisis.
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The constitutional monarchy that eventually emerged built to directly on principles established during the Civil Wars. The kings were not above the law, that taxation required consent, and that Parliament had an essential role in governance. These principles would eventually spread far beyond England's shores to shape democratic developments around the world. Indeed, the historian Professor Blair Worden we.
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Still live with the consequences of the most traumatic event in our history and the most formative. We cannot understand our past or our present without understanding the Civil War.
- [43:30]
A
On that cold January Day in 1649 when an axe fell and a king died, England crossed a threshold from which there was no return. The old order had ended and the modern world had begun. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit. Thank you also to my researcher Max Wintool, my producer Rob Weinberg, and to Amy Haddo, who edited this episode. We are always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line and notjusthetorshistoryhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History. Hit.
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