The English Civil War began in 1642, the result of escalating political, social and religious tensions between Charles I and Parliament. The English Crown had received insufficient revenue for decades, and was, periodically and reluctantly, forced to seek Parliament’s aid in granting it financial assistance. However, in return, Parliament increasingly expected to be heard by the King, on grievances relating to three of the key aspects of seventeenth-century life: rights, money, and God.
From 1629 to 1640, Charles elected to reign without Parliament in order to hush the exasperating voices of its more strident members. Instead, he relied on money raised through the exploitation of ancient kingly privileges and customs. These were thought by many to be abuses of power and an erosion of the people’s civil liberties.
Religion added to the frictions. While many in the House of Commons were Presbyterian or Puritan, Charles was believed to be a Catholic sympathiser – a suspicion that was fuelled by the evident Roman Catholicism of his French wife, Henrietta Maria. The King was an intensely devout man who believed in an ecclesiastical structure in which bishops were not only the commanding pediment, but also the crucial cornerstone. A weak ruler generally, he insisted on the imposition of his strict religious views. Some Puritans, meanwhile, headed overseas to escape Charles’s persecution, many of them gravitating to the new colonies in America.
In 1639 and 1640 the Scots invaded England in protest at Charles’s attempts to inflict his High Anglican creed upon their Presbyterian churchmen. The King was obliged to summon Parliament in order to fund a defensive army. This left him vulnerable to the built-up resentments of members of the House of Commons arriving in Westminster, who demanded lasting and meaningful concessions. A key one of these was to make Parliament’s summoning a regular occurrence, rather than remaining dependent on the whim of the Crown. Even in the face of foreign invasion, many MPs were unwilling to give the King what he wanted until they had been satisfied. Although Charles tried to regain control, he could not.
In August 1642, after further frustrations and humiliations, he raised his standard at Nottingham in a call to arms. That autumn the Royalist and Parliamentary armies stumbled into each other while heading towards London. At the ensuing battle of Edgehill, shockingly for both sides, many hundreds of Englishmen were killed by their compatriots.
The following year the war seemed to be going in the King’s favour, but Parliament’s control of London and the navy, its superior supply chain, and its subsequent alliance with the Scots, gave it an increasingly clear advantage. 1644 saw the Royalists lose control of the north of England, when Scottish and Parliamentary soldiers destroyed the King’s forces at Marston Moor. The following year Parliament debuted its imposing, professional, fighting machine – the New Model Army – which triumphed at the battle of Naseby and captured Bristol, England’s second city. By the spring of 1646 Charles’s military forces were beaten, and the First Civil War was effectively over. The Crown’s diverse enemies had been brought together by fear and suspicion of a monarch who seemed to threaten their civil and religious liberties. The question for them now was: what to do with the defeated King?