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Not Just the Tudors
The English Civil War
00:44:02
An epic exposition of the causes, battles, and consequences of a war that toppled Britain's monarchy.
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- [00:00]
A
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 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, 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. What happens when a kingdom is torn apart not by foreign invaders, but by its own people, where the word of the monarch is no longer law? Where Parliament dares to challenge the throne? When the fate of an entire people hangs in the balance? The Civil wars of 1642-1651 were a bloody contest for the very soul of Britain, and around 200 to 250,000 lives were lost. That was nearly 5% of the population, a toll that is nearly double proportionately the devastating fatality rate of the First World War. This was no isolated English affair. From the Highlands of Scotland to the fields of Ireland, a series of interconnected conflicts swept across the British Isles, known as the wars of the Three Kingdoms. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit. Over the next two episodes, I'm going to examine this dramatic and consequential decade in British history with the help of contributions from an array of brilliant historians drawn from previous episodes in our Not Just the Tudors archive be exploring how and why England, Scotland and Ireland descended into war? What drove subjects to take up arms against their king? And how did religious strife, political ambition and personal rivalries ignite a crisis that would topple the monarchy and forever change the relationship between the people, Parliament and the crown. The consequences of these conflicts still echo through British politics and society today. The struggle between the monarch and the elected representatives of the people, the limits of government and the rights of citizens. All of these were forged in the crucible of civil war. The roots of a catastrophic conflict had been pushing deeper into England's religious and political soil for decades. When Charles asceeded the throne in 1625, he inherited not just a crown, but a kingdom simmering with tensions. By the late 1630s King Charles regime was deeply unpopular, and it was religion that was central to the emerging conflict. When Charles succeeded his father, James I and VI in 1625, he quickly raised fears among English Protestants by marrying the Roman Catholic Henrietta Maria of France. The marriage rang alarm bells about a growing Catholic influence at court. Leander Delah is Henrietta Maria's biographer.
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Her existence was a stick to beat Charles with and there were concerns that somehow she would be a Trojan horse for Catholicism. There was anger that Charles had been obliged to promise the King of France and the Pope that he would lessen the persecution of Catholics in England if he was to marry Henrietta Maria. And many people were very fearful of that. Protestantism was being rolled back in Europe and they felt very threatened.
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Influenced by his Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, Charles religious policies had been pushing the Church of England in a more ceremonial direction, a move that many viewed as suspiciously Catholic. The King also believed church leaders should be treated with deference, which was particularly opposed by the Puritans. Such deep religious divides were not merely theological disagreements, but fundamental differences about how societies should be organised. And the Catholic Queen Henrietta Maria was seen as partially responsible for that too.
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Sort of myths are that somehow the Reformation put us on the path to parliamentary democracy, that history is somehow linear and it's all sort of one step at a time. We had the Reformation and then, lo, we had parliamentary democracy. That's one myth, and I think it's quite an important one, because then if, of course, you're not part of that narrative, if you are a Catholic consort or Shias, then you must be against progress, you must be a sort of negative force. And therefore she must in some way be responsible for Charles's authoritarianism.
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A
But religion was only one facet of the deepening crisis. This authoritarianism of King Charles and his father James before him was rooted in their belief in the divine right of kings, the doctrine that monarchs were appointed by God and answerable only to God, not to their subjects or any earthly authority. This belief, for which Henrietta Maria was also erroneously blamed, in part put Charles on a collision course with Parliament, which increasingly sought to check royal power and assert its own authority in matters of tax and governance. Whatever his queen's influence may have been, Charles insistence on the divine right of kings belied his fundamental misunderstanding and of the changing political mood in England. While his Tudor predecessors had successfully balanced royal authority with parliamentary consent, Charles seemed unable or unwilling to recognize the growing importance of Parliament as an institution representing the interests of the people. Perhaps no decision better illustrates Charles fatal misunderstanding of his realm than his choice to rule without parliament for 11 years between 1629 and and 1640, a period his critics branded the 11 years tyranny. After dissolving Parliament, when faced with opposition, Charles attempted to govern alone, raising revenues through controversial means. These included implementing policies without parliamentary consent and imposing ship money, a tax traditionally levied only on coastal areas, but extended inland by Charles. As Dr. Jonathan Healy explains in the.
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1630S, the crown is short of cash and they are worried about the international situation. They're worried about the French, they're worried about the Dutch, they're worried about pirates. And so, quite understandably, they say, we need to build the navy, but they don't have any money. So what they do is, they say, there's this old levy that we can do where basically coastal communities can be told to provide a ship for the Royal Navy. And that's fine, that's relatively uncontroversial. But then they make the completely understandable logical leap, which is that if the coastal communities are getting protection, then so are the inland communities, because they're also getting protection from French invasion, or they might want to invest in a trading venture, and they don't want that to be attacked by pirates. So it's only fair for those inland communities to pay for it as well. The trouble is, it is a new tax. There's no way you can get around that. So essentially what it means is that people are being taxed with the new tax without first having voted it in Parliament. Now, this is important because traditionally in England, there's an understanding, certainly by this point, that for the most part, any tax has to be done by consent, and consent is given through Parliament. It's quite clever. What they do, in a way, is they say, okay, fine, we'll have a lawsuit. And the judges, the 12 common law judges, will give a judgment about whether it's legal or not. So there's this big legal case. It comes down to this argument as to what happens in an emergency and who gets to decide when it's an emergency. Because most people agree that in an emergency situation, the Crown should be able to take people's money to defend the state. That's uncontroversial. But should that emergency situation be one where the way they put it is Hannibal is at the gates? Does Hannibal literally have to be at the gates? Or can it be a case that the King, who, of course has lots of diplomatic networks and knows what's going on around Europe, he might have information that we mere mortals don't have. Can the King say, ah, a few years down the line there will be an emergency. That's what the judges decide in the ship money case. They decide that the King is the judge of whether or not there is an emergency. Now, it doesn't take a huge amount to see that could be used cynically. And that's where people get very worried about it, because it means that the King has the legal power to basically declare an emergency when he wants or say that there might be an emergency in a couple of years and then take people's money without going to Parliament.
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Charles attempts to raise money without parliamentary approval alienated many of his subjects and created widespread resentment among propertied classes whose support he relied upon in any conflict. Professor Ted Vallance captures the growing discontent.
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So Charles has been governing without Parliament for 11 years because of disagreements with Parliament early on in his reign over foreign policy, over taxation. And he's been basically supporting his regime through prerogative means, through prerogative taxation. And that has led critics in England to feel that he is ruling beyond the law and also fearing that without Parliament being in session, there isn't really any kind of body or organization that can hold the King to account or that can bring grievances from the country to the King's attention. So broader anxieties here that go beyond the religious sphere that are about Charles, the first government, how he is governing, his style of government. Some of these criticisms are going to the extent, even at this Stage in the 1630s, of making allusions to Charles being a tyrant comparable to Roman emperors such as Nero, for example. All of these are quite subdued and kept under wraps during the 1630s, but we can find them there in some of the sort of polemical Puritan writings of that period.
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Now, while tensions were brewing in England, it was actually in Scotland where the spark that would ignite the Civil War first appeared. In 1637, Charles and Archbishop Laud had attempted to impose a new Anglican prayer book on the Scottish Kirk. It was seen as a brazen affront to Scottish religious sensibilities and provoked immediate and fierce resistance. Thousands signed the national covenant in 1638, pledging to defend their Presbyterian faith against royal interference. This mass movement, known as the Covenanters, effectively seized control of Scottish governance and abolished bishops from the Kirk, directly challenging charles authority. In 1639, Charles marched north with an ill prepared army, only to retreat without battle when confronted by the disciplined Scottish Covenanter forces. The following year proved even more disastrous. The Scots invaded northern England, defeated English forces at the Battle of New Bern and occupied Newcastle and Durham. This humiliating defeat forced Charles to recall Parliament to raise funds for war.
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And that outbreak of rebellion in Scotland provides an opportunity for Charles English critics as well. Professor Ted VALLANCE because it basically forces Charles to go back to Parliament to seek money to support this war that he needs to wage against the Scottish rebel. And that then gives the opportunity for critics in Parliament to start attacking the personal rule of Charles the First and the religious and political policies that he's been pursuing.
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As if the King's position wasn't precarious enough, in October 1641, Ireland erupted in rebellion. Led by Sir Phillim O' Neill and other Catholic gentry, the Irish rebels seized control of much of Ulster and other regions. O' Neill claimed to be acting under Charles authority, even producing a forged Royal commission. Though the King immediately condemned the uprising, what began as a political revolt quickly spiralled into sectarian violence throughout Ulster. Catholic rebels attacked Protestant settlers with reports of massacres, spreading terror across England. While early propaganda exaggerated the disaster death toll to hundreds of thousands, modern historians estimate approximately 12,000 Protestants were killed during the rebellion, still a devastating number from a population of some 40,000 settlers.
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Professor Ted VALLANCE There's a fear here that actually Charles is not unsympathetic to these rebels. In fact, there's a circulation of a faked commission from Charles authorizing the rebellion. And there's anxieties here that Charles may use any army that's raised to suppress this Irish rebel, not against the Irish rebels, but against Parliament itself, that he may even welcome these sort of Irish Catholic rebels into England to commit all sorts of terrible imagined atrocities and so forth. So the Irish rebellion really stymies attempts at compromise and negotiation and plays into the hands of more hardline figures within Parliament who want tougher measures, more limitations on the King's power, who want a more puritanical Church settlement. And it also ramps up these security concerns. So we're increasingly looking more towards sort of military confrontation rather than just polemical debates within Parliament and in the press as well.
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The final rupture between King and Parliament came In January of 1642, when Charles entered the House of Commons with an armed force, intending to arrest five MPs he viewed as traitors. But his plan was thwarted.
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Dr. Jonathan Healy, one of the courtiers close to the Queen, Lucy Hay, the Countess of Carlisle, had actually gone and warned at least one of the five members, or possibly the one in the House of Lords. Lord Manderville warned them this was what the King was going to do. So everyone in the Morning, who needed to know what was going to happen, knew what was going to happen. The Commons is sat debating throughout the morning when they're all getting reports from Whitehall and then they go on their lunch break and someone goes up to Whitehall to see what's going on. There's all these soldiers around eventually, and they go back and they meet after lunch. And then it gets to midway through the afternoon. And then finally it happened. Charles came out of Whitehall, gathered something like 500 soldiers and then took them all the way down what's now Whitehall was then called King street to the House of Commons. They'd had another warning from the Earl of Essex, and they'd had a third warning. As soon as Charles came out of Whitehall and gathered all these soldiers and trundled down this. What was quite a muddy and icy street, an employee of the French Embassy was running in front of them, was able to say what was going on. So they knew it was about to go down. And the five of them slipped out of the palace of Westminster and went by boat up to the City of London and hid. So when Charles got there, he came into the House of Commons and said, where are these five traitors? And the speaker said, they're not here. And also, I can't say anything. I can only give voice to. To the House of Commons who's called me here.
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Charles's attempted coup had failed spectacularly. I see the birds have flown, he reportedly remarked, but in truth, it was his authority that had vanished.
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And there's this one incident which happened when Charles was on his way back in a coach, is that someone ran up to his coach and threw in a pamphlet which all but accused him of being a tyrant, and encourage people to withdraw their allegiance to him. And these pamphlets have been scattered around St. Paul. So this is real sort of sense of an uprising of the people in London, and Charles can't escape it. So it's very frightening for Charles. And very soon he leaves London and initially goes out to Hampton Court and then Windsor. But there's still this kind of political crisis in Parliament. What it ends up hinging on is this question of the militia. Because of what had happened, perceived as a military attack on Parliament, the reformists wanted to get control of the county militia because that would protect them. But of course, the county militia had always been controlled by the Crown, and for Parliament to take control of it was a real radical step. And there was no way that, or it's very unlikely that Charles would actually sign off on a parliamentary bill taking away his control of the militia. So what eventually happened, and this is again in an atmosphere of sort of big street protest. And eventually, with this kind of process going on, eventually, in early March, Parliament passed what was called the militia ordinance. What they were doing by passing this as an ordinance, it went into legal force, even though it didn't have the assent of the King. And in order to do that, they basically had to argue that constitutionally they had the right to do that. If the King was obviously going crazy or acting against the interests of the country, of the people, then it was Parliament's role. And it's almost like the same logic as ship money, but it's Parliament taking the emergency powers, if you like, because they represent the people as they see it. They pass this ordinance giving them control of the militia, and do it on the basis that they are the ones who represent the nation best. They are the ones who represent the people. So you've come from a situation where most people accept that ultimately it's the King who represents the nation, to a moment where Parliament is saying, no, we as representatives of the people are the ones who represent the nation better. And that is an insurmountable divide. People are not going to square that circle without fighting it out.
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Forced to flee London, Charles retreated north to raise an army. And it's here that two factions emerge, the Parliamentarian Roundheads and the Royalist Cavaliers. The Roundheads largely drew their support from London, major towns and eastern England. The King's supporters, the Cavaliers, include much of the traditional landed gentry and their tenants. He could call upon donations from these loyal subjects, including treasured possessions and valuables contributed by Royalist households. Jesse Charles describes how these factional names emerged.
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They came from the streets of London in the build up to war at the end of 1641. So Cavalier was a word that had been used before. Chevalier as a sort of sort of chivalric term, quite complementary. But cavalier as a political term and as a pejorative political term comes right out from the violence that is in London just before Charles I tries to arrest the five members and just before he leaves London and then the war starts, there are two separate groups and factions. The Roundheads, it's thought to be, because they were largely apprentices. I mean, this is a generalization, but because their haircuts were cropped short, so they were the Roundheads and the Cavaliers were seen as the sort of more establishment, long haired, dashing, but cruel followers of the King. And they started calling each other these terms, right, in the sort of December days of 1641, when the streets of London did descend into some violence, but it was quite controlled violence, but there was a lot of petitioning and there was a lot of protests and there was a lot of posturing.
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In August 1642, Charles raised the Royal Standard at Nottingham, effectively declaring war against Parliament. Two months later, on 23 October, near the village of Kinnerton, the first major battle of the civil war erupted at Edgehill. It would mark the point of no return. Charles marched southeast from Shrewsbury with some 12,400 men. His goal was to capture London and crush the rebellion in a single stroke. Leading the cavalry was his dashing nephew, Prince Rupert, a 23 year old veteran of European warfare with a reputation for brilliance and brutality in equal measure. On the opposite side was The Parliament's army, 15,000 strong, commanded by Robert Devereaux, 3rd Earl of Essex. Neither army expected to meet the other that day, but the night before, scouts from both sides made a startling discovery that their enemies were close, perhaps too close to avoid confrontation. As dawn broke, Charles made his fateful decision. His army would descend from the commanding height of Edge Hill to force a confrontation with Parliament's army positioned near Kinnerton. It took hours for both armies to form battle lines, and it wasn't until around 2 in the afternoon that the confrontation began with a thunderous artillery exchange. The battle opened properly when Parliament's cannons targeted the Royalist lines, reportedly firing directly at the position where King Charles stood with his sons, the young princes. It was a shocking attempt to decapitate the Royalist cause in a single blow. An hour later, Prince Rupert dramatically unleashed his cavalry. An unstoppable tide of Royalist horsemen smashed into the left wing of Essex's forces, shattering their formation. Parliament's horsemen broke and fled, with Rupert's cavalry in hot pursuit. But Rupert would then make a critical error that would come to haunt the Royalist cause. Rather than regrouping and returning to sport the infantry, his cavalry pursued the fleeing enemy for miles, stopping to plunder the Parliamentary baggage. The Royalist infantry was left dangerously exposed. Meanwhile, in the centre of the battle, a desperate struggle unfolded around the King's standard, a massive 2 1/2 metre banner carried by Sir Edmund Verney, knight marshal to Charles. Despite personal reservations about the war, Verney had remained loyal to his King, famously.
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Declaring, I have eaten his bread and served him near 30 years and will.
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Not do so base things as to forsake him.
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When the Parliamentary soldiers closed in, demanding, Bernie surrender the standard and save his life, he refused.
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My life is my own, he reportedly.
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Said, but the standard is The King's, and I will not deliver it with while I live.
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True to his word, Sir Edmund Verney perished defending his king's banner, cut down in a ferocious melee. Vernie's severed hand was still clutching the standards pole. With Prince Rupert absent from the battlefield, Essex's superior infantry pressed their advantage against the Royalist foot soldiers. The King's forces fought, and at one desperate moment, Charles's sons, including the future Charles ii, almost fell into enemy hands. The royal cause seemed on the brink of immediate collapse. But as daylight began to fade around half past four, Prince Rupert finally returned with his cavalry, having ridden miles in pursuit of his fleeing enemy. In a daring counter attack, Captain John Smith of Lord Grandison's horse heroically recaptured the royal standard. Rupert's returning cavalry forced the Parliamentarians to withdraw. The day's fighting was over. Night fell upon a gruesome scene. Hundreds dead, thousands wounded, and soldiers from both armies forced to sleep hungry and without shelter amid a bitter frost. The battle had lasted barely two and a half hours, yet its brutality shocked a nation unused to such bloodletting. On home soil, though, the Battle of Edgehill is often considered a draw, the King had gained an important strategic advantage. Essex retreated northward to the security of Warwick, leaving the road to London temporarily open. Had Charles immediately pressed his advantage and marched on the capital, the war might have ended swiftly. But instead the King moved cautiously, capturing Banbury on 27 October and Oxford on 29 October, where he set up his headquarters for the remainder of the war. The delay proved costly. It allowed Essex to race back to London via Northampton and gather reinforcements. By the time Charles approached London in November, Essex had organised a formidable defence, reinforced by the 6,000 to 8,000 strong London trained bands. At the Battle of Turnham Green on 13 November, the Royalists, now outnumbered two to one, were forced to withdraw. The opportunity for a quick victory had slipped away. What many had hoped would be a single show of force, a token battle to purge the nation's ills, instead revealed the brutal reality of a conflict that would tear the country apart for four more years. There was no going back. The Rubicon had been crossed. By mid-1643, the Royalists had gained momentum. In July, the King's forces stormed Bristol, England's second largest city and a vital port. This significant victory expanded Charles I's control over the west and seemed to shift the war in his favor. Buoyed by these successes, the King sought to press his advantage. The parliamentarian cause seemed on the brink of collapse. In the West. But a siege in Gloucester forced Parliament's hand. The Earl of Essex led a desperate relief force, breaking the siege and then, harried by Prince Rupert's cavalry, began a hard fought retreat towards London. For 10 days and across 60 miles, Essex's battered army was pursued relentlessly. Prince Rupert slowed the Parliamentarians enough for the Royalist main force to block their road home at Newbury, which found itself at the heart of the kingdom's fate. At dawn on 20 September 1643, Essex's men seized the high ground Round Hill and Wash Common, gaining a crucial tactical advantage. The move robbed the Royalists of the initiative, forcing them to attack uphill and through a patchwork of hedges, lanes and enclosures that blunted their cavalry's power. The Parliamentarian artillery opened fire on Sir Nicholas Byron's advancing Royalist infantry. Fierce fighting erupted as Royalist musketeers ran low on powder, only for Rupert's cavalry to charge and regain the lost ground. Yet the enclosed fields hampered the cavalry's effectiveness. Parliament's inventory, entrenched behind hedgerows, held firm. Throughout the day, the battle raged across the fields and lanes. The Parliamentarians, reinforced by the London trained bands, withstood repeated Royalist assaults. In the north, near the River Kennet, a stalemate developed as neither side found it possible to gain ground. The fighting was brutal and personal. Lord Falkland, a Royalist luminary, was killed leading a charge, a symbol of the day's high cost. As evening fell, both armies were exhausted and bloodied. The Royalists, critically low on ammunition and unable to break Essex's lines, withdrew under cover of darkness into Newbury. The Parliamentarians, battered but unbroken, held the field. The battle ended indecisively, but with Essex's force achieving its crucial objective, the road to London remained open. The Parliamentarians, though suffering heavy losses, were able to retreat safely and Essex returned to London to a hero's welcome. The Royalists, meanwhile, were left to count their dead and wounded, including several high ranking officers. Their failure to destroy Essex's army marked another turning point. The Royalist advance in the south was halted. The psychological blow was profound. As 1643 drew to a close, both sides sought outside allies. What had begun as a struggle between King and Parliament in England had transformed into an interlocking series of conflicts. The wars of the Three Kingdoms. Earlier in the year, Parliament had secured an alliance with the Scottish Covenanters through the Solemn League and Covenant. This wasn't merely a military pact, but a religious and political agreement with far reaching implications. The Scots agreed to send an army to aid Parliament in return for promises to reform the Church of England along Presbyterian lines and to preserve the Scottish Presbyterian system. While the English parliamentarians viewed this primarily as a military necessity, for the Scots, it was a sacred covenant to advance true religion across Britain. In January 1644, a Scottish Covenanter army of 20,000 men crossed the border into England, dramatically altering the military balance. The entry of Scottish forces into northern England significantly strengthened Parliament's position. Meanwhile, in Ireland, the conflict had evolved into a war that would go on for 11 years. A complex, multi sided struggle that would prove even more devastating than the fighting in England. The Confederation of Kilkenny effectively governed much of Ireland as a de facto independent Catholic state. They professed loyalty to to Charles I while fighting to secure religious freedom and recover confiscated lands. The Confederate Supreme Council sent diplomatic missions to Catholic powers across Europe, receiving financial and military support from the Papacy, Spain and France. By the summer of 1644, Yorkshire became the crucible where the war's fate would be forged. York, the Royalist stronghold in the north, was besieged by a combined force of Parliamentarians and Scottish Covenanters. Prince Rupert gathered a relief force and marched north, determined to break the siege and crush the allied army. The Marquis of Newcastle defending York faced overwhelming odds as the allied armies encircled the city. Prince Rupert's approach was bold and unorthodox. He outmanoeuvred the besiegers by seizing a bridge of boats and relieving York without a direct fight. Yet his triumph was incomplete. He insisted on drawing Newcastle's forces out for a decisive battle, believing he carried the King's command to destroy the enemy at once. Newcastle hesitated, wary of his opponents, superior numbers and the exhaustion of his own men. But Rupert's will prevailed. The Royalist and allied armies could converged on the open fields of Marston Moor west of York, setting the stage for one of the largest and bloodiest battles ever fought on English soil. On 2 July 1644, the armies faced one another across the moor. The Parliamentarian and Covenanter alliance, numbering more than 28,000 men, outnumbered the royalists, who could muster only around 18,000. The parliamentarian left wing, commanded by a little known castle cavalry commander called Oliver Cromwell, was anchored on a ridge with his disciplined Eastern association cavalry, soon to earn the name Ironsides, supported by Scottish horse and dragoons.
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Professor Ronald Hutton Marston Moor is the biggest battle of the entire war and it's an enormous royalist mistake, but the royalists have an extremely good pair of armies that have just joined up, but they're outnumbered by the three great armies of which Oliver is part of One, he's commanding the cavalry of the army of East Anglia. And when the two armies square up to each other, because the Royalists were expecting the enemy to be retreating, they ran up hard against the rear guard of Cromwell's army and then screeched to a halt, suddenly realizing they were facing a determined enemy.
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For hours, the army stood in tense expectation, separated by a ditch and hedgerows. Sporadic cannon fire echoed across the fields, but neither side moved.
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And for the rest of the day, the two armies just stare at each other. They're far too close to each other, there's only a ditch between them. The larger army, which has Cromwell commanding the cavalry on the left wing, is up on quite a steep slope. And as the army sit and stare at each other, the pioneers, these are the poor devils with the spades and shovels in Cromwell's army, are filling in the holes in the ground and clearing away the gorse bushes and the bumps on the slope in front. And so when Cromwell's generals decide to attack and Cromwell gets the order, he leads 4,5000 cavalry at a breakneck speed, straight downhill over obstacles that have now been cleared to smack into 2 to 3,000 enemy who are standing to receive them and also have just scrambled onto their horses. Because the Royalists had fought by that end of the day, nobody would attack, so they're taken by surprise.
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Prince Rupert led a desperate countercharge, but the Scottish cavalry under David Leslie joined Cromwell, turning back Rupert's attack and forcing him from the field. Legend has it that as the battle raged, Rupert hid in a bean field on the Parliamentarian right. Sir Thomas Fairfax's cavalry was initially repulsed and the Royalist infantry surged forward, capturing Parliamentarian guns and threatening to turn the tide. In this moment of crisis, Fairfax, wounded and bloodied, crossed the battlefield to urge Oliver Cromwell to intervene. Cromwell responded with characteristic decisiveness. Rallying his ironsides, he wheeled across the rear of the Royalist lines, crashed into the exposed Royalist cavalry under Goring, and then turned upon the infantry, shattering the Royalist centre. The battle became a rout. The Royalist white coats made a last doom stand. Most were cut down as the rest of the Royalist army broke and fled. In just two hours, the Royalist cause in the north lay in ruins. Over 4,000 Royalist soldiers were dead and the Parliamentarians had lost only around 300 men. York fell soon afterwards and the north was lost to King Charles. Master More was Oliver Cromwell's first major engagement as a commander, and it was here that his reputation as a brilliant and relentless cavalry leader was forged. Professor Ronald Hutton, He's a natural born killer.
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He takes a pleasure in bloodletting, which is relatively unusual. He is a very good tactician and later on, a very good strategician as well. He's a born soldier. Also. He's extraordinarily lucky. He is always or virtually always in a well trained, very, very well equipped and well paid force which outnumbers its enemy. The fact that he would refer to other human beings as stubble to our sword so exultantly indicates again his bloodthirstiness.
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Cromwell's Ironsides, drilled to discipline and motivated by religious zeal, proved decisive. Cromwell's ability to maintain order among his victorious cavalry, resisting the temptation to pursue fleeing enemies and then redeploying them at the critical moment to smash the Royalist flank was the battle's turning point. The discipline and training he instilled in his men became the model for Parliament's later military successes. The Victorian historian Thomas Carlyle, who compiled Cromwell's letters and speeches and captured the drama and significance of Marston Moore in his evocative prose, Carly described the battle.
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As the most enormous hurly burly of fire and smoke and steel flashings and death tumult ever seen in those regions, the end of which, about 10 at night, was 4,150 bodies to be buried and total ruin to the King's affairs in those northern parts.
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Cromwell himself wrote to Colonel Valentine, truly.
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England and the Church of God hath had great favour from the Lord in this great victory given unto us such as the like never was since this war began.
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It had all the evidences of an.
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Absolute victory over obtained by the Lord's blessing upon the godly party principally. We never charged, but we routed the enemy. The left wing which I commanded, being our own horse, saving a few Scots in our rear, beat all the Prince's horse. God made them as stubble to our swords.
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The Royalists had lost their grip on the north and the legend of Oliver Cromwell and his Ironsides was born. The battle's violence and its consequences echoed through the remainder of the conflict, marking the rise of Parliament's military power and the beginning of the end for King Charles cause in the north. But tensions were growing within the Parliamentary leadership. At the Second Battle of Newbury, fought in October 1644, despite surrounding the Royalists with three separate forces forces the Parliamentarians failed to deliver a decisive blow. The Royalists, outmanoeuvred and outnumbered, nevertheless held firm, using terrain determination and tactical discipline to frustrate and repel their attackers. As the smoke of musket fire cleared the Royalist army slipped away under the COVID of darkness, battered but intact. For Oliver Cromwell, who had witnessed the bungling indecision and lacklustre leadership among his own commanders, the failure was intolerable. He blamed the aristocratic generals, men more concerned with preserving social order than winning the war, and fiercely criticised their reluctance to press their advantage. This moment fueled his call for the creation of a new meritocratic fighting force. The New Model army, built not on birthright, but on competence and conviction. Professor Ian Gentles explains, the radicals in.
- [39:33]
G
Parliament became increasingly dissatisfied with the aristocratic leadership of the parliamentary army by people like the Earl of Essex, the Earl of Manchester and others. And so they decided in the autumn of 1644 to purge the aristocratic leadership. And the way they did this, this was by passing a motion called the Self Denying Ordinance, saying that no member of Parliament, either the upper house, the House of Lords or the lower house, the House of Commons, could henceforth hold military command in the parliamentary army. This, interestingly meant that Oliver Cromwell, who was a member of the House of Commons, would have to give up his position in the army. He was willing to do that in order to get rid of the aristocrats. And no one knew that he would return to the army. It looked for all the world as though he was gone. So the House of Lords resisted and resented the attempt to purge the aristocrats from the army because, as they put it, the nobility have historically seen as their primary role to defend the country. And that's what they were doing in the parliamentary army, defending England against a tyrannical king. So they fought tooth and nail until basically Parliament, the lower house, pulled the rug out from under them and created a new army simply by choking off the funding of the existing army, directing all the funding to this new military force, which soon came to be known as the New Model army because it was a refashioned military instru and recruiting a new army, some of it from the wreckage of the old army. Many of the new soldiers, they had been in the Earl of Essex's infantry, they'd been in the Earl of Manchester's army, so they were ruthlessly recruited and a large number of new soldiers were also recruited. And there was quite a bit of conscription. It was not an entirely volunteer army, although most of the cavalry were volunteers, most of the infantry were conscripts. Anyway, this army very rapidly put together and it was very rapidly funded with huge gobs of money, and it soon met its first challenge at the Battle of Naseby on June 14, 1645. And everyone thought that because the Royalist cavalry were so much more experienced that they would win easily.
- [42:16]
D
And the creation of the New Model army is significant, Professor Ted Vallance, because what we see from the development of that organization is also an emerging sense that army is a single kind of political entity. It's not, in their own words, a mere mercenary army, but an army that has been created to defend the liberties and freedoms of, of the English people. There's also some really interesting things that then happen in terms of the organization of the army itself. It establishes something called the General Council of the army, which is really unusual because it's basically a kind of proto democratic organization. So instead of the traditional kind of military hierarchy where you've got the officers at the top and the rank and file at the bottom, you've now got this really important body in which you have representatives of the rank and file who are basically being put on the same level as their commanders. And a growing sense in which certainly from the rank and file this is absolutely appropriate. They do have to have commanders, but ultimately, because it's a citizen's army, in fact, actually the rank and file must have a say in terms of the governance of the army itself.
- [43:24]
A
Within a few months, Oliver Cromwell's disciplined New Model army would be put to the test at the decisive Battle of Nasby. Next time, how the Battle of Nasby marked the beginning of the end for royalist hopes and how King Charles played a desperate gambit to reclaim power marked by secret alliances and fractured loyalties, all of which led to a bloody climax that sealed his fate. Thank you for listening to this episode of Not Just the Tudors From History hit. And to my producer, Rob Weinberg, 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 Not Just the tudors@historyhit.com and I look forward to joining you again for another episode. Next time on Not Just the Tudors From History Hit.
- [44:35]
G
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