English Civil War - War of the Three Kingdoms DOCUMENTARY

Welcome to another installment of the complete Kings and Generals documentaries! Today we enter one of the most crucial and tumultuous periods in British history: the English Civil War, also known as the War of the Three Kingdoms. Spanning throughout the 17th century, this tumultuous conflict was marked by intense battles, deep-rooted religious strife, and a web of complex political issues that tore a nation apart, from the blood-soaked fields of Edgehill to the besieged city of York. and from the epic clashes at Marston Moor to the siege of Oxford. It was a war that pitted brother against brother, father against son, as opposing forces fought over their vision of England's future.

Battle lines were often drawn along religious beliefs, adding a layer of intensity to an already heated struggle, but the English Civil War was not just a religious war; It was a social and political powder keg ready to explode. The monarchy, headed by King Charles I Stuart, clashed with Parliament over issues of power and taxation. This political upheaval set the stage for a divided nation, and the consequences would change England forever. Join us as we unravel the dramatic and complex tapestry of the English Civil War, exploring its battles, religious struggles, and political issues that forever altered the course of history.

Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and give us a thumbs up, that helps a lot! When one brother turns against another, it would be well to keep his sympathies private. It's easier to do it when every step you take isn't recorded on a server somewhere in the world; well, maybe you know how to keep things private despite that: use a vpn, like our sponsor of this video, nordvpn, with a special offer available at nord vpn dot com slash kings and generals. NordVPN gives you the luxury of network security. If you take a wrong turn, NordVPN will get you back instantly;

No one passing by you in cyberspace can pick your pockets, so to speak. Trackers can't track you, advertisers can't manipulate you, and criminals can't breach your invisible defenses—that's the security you get with NordVPN, and these days you're only putting yourself at risk by continuing without it. And of course, a VPN means a customizable IP address, and that means you get the entire Internet, not just the partial region blocked you normally browse from. Now for that deal: By using our exclusive link, nord vpn dot com slash kings and generals, you'll get four bonus months added to your NordVPN plan.

There's a thirty-day risk-free money-back guarantee if you start using NordVPN and then decide not to, so there's no harm in at least giving it a try. Get that offer and secure your internet link at nord vpn dot com slash kings and generals. The Stuart dynasty came to power in England when the childless Elizabeth I died on 24 March 1603, and was succeeded by the King of Scotland, James VI, who later also became James I of England. This reign for the first time united the

kingdoms

of England, Scotland and Ireland under a single monarch and saw a rise in the popularity of "divine right", the God-given authority of a monarch to rule as he wished, unhindered by the powers that be. of the. nobles or people.

After 22 years on the throne, during which momentous events such as the sailing of the Mayflower and the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot took place, King James died in March 1625 and was succeeded by his second son, who ascended the throne. as Charles I. Charles, a man of scholarly orientation and a predilection for hunting, it was immediately clear that he had inherited his father's enthusiasm for divine right and began to act in a manner that deeply infuriated the influential factions of his country, the most important of which was Parliament. Today, the British Houses of Lords and Commons are the governing institutions of the United Kingdom, but in the mid-17th century this was not yet the case.

The king still had executive authority to make decisions and his decree was the only means by which Parliament could legally meet. However, by the mid-17th century the Houses had acquired significant de facto power, such as the ability to raise taxes much more effectively and fluidly than the king himself, making it difficult for English monarchs to operate without parliamentary approval. Upon ascending the throne in 1625, Charles, apparently Protestant, married Henriette Mary, the staunchly Catholic sister of King Louis XIII of France. While this was initially seen as a shrewd diplomatic move, Mary's fervently pro-Catholic actions caused the predominantly Reformed English to despise her.

This religious dimension of the royal-parliamentary divide was aggravated by a number of factors both internal and external. In continental Europe, the Thirty Years' War raged without end. Many in England and particularly in Parliament wanted to take up arms to prevent the Catholic counter-reformation from wiping out their Protestant brethren, but Charles would not do so directly. Charles's meager attempts in 1625 and 1628 to intervene in Cádiz and the siege of La Rochelle respectively were a failure and only increased tension between the king and his parliament. Even worse than this was the growing influence of William Laud, the interloping bishop of London who defended an anti-Calvinist sect of Protestantism known as Arminianism.

This denomination brought some Christian practices closer to those of the Roman Catholic Church and was seen as yet another sign that Charles I was dangerously friendly to the hated papists. All these factors gradually increased the tension between parliament and the monarchy. In short, he was turning England into a tinderbox. At the center of the chasm also lay more tangible issues, the most prominent of which was the growing opposition of the propertied classes in parliament to the absolute rule of their monarch. The first parliament called by the king in 1625 got off to a bad start on this front because of the most enduring issue: taxes.

Typically, parliament granted a new monarch permission to impose customs duties called "tonnage and weight" for an entire reign, but Charles was only granted that permission for one year. Parliament did provide levels of funding and taxation that would have been adequate in the past, but were woefully inadequate when inflation and other costs are taken into account. As Parliament was continually unwilling to grant sufficient funds, Charles began raising money on his own. Money was borrowed along with the crown jewels as security for repayment, tonnage and pound duties were collected regardless of parliamentary approval and, most annoyingly for those affected, so-called "forced loans" were imposed on subjects.

Carlos's richest. In total, Charles raised more than £250,000, but these measures provoked anger and resentment. Many knights refused to pay and were imprisoned, while others hindered the actions of local collectors and were similarly imprisoned by royal decree without trial. Because this method of imprisonment was typically only used when the state was in exceptional danger, Charles' use of it was considered an abuse. When Parliament was reconvened in 1628, a representative named Sir Edward Coke drafted the Petition of Right, a document setting out a list of specific liberties that Charles would be absolutely prohibited from infringing. Among other things, the main concerns were the illegality of arbitrary imprisonment and the collection of taxes without parliamentary consent.

Desperately needing parliamentary approval for funding, the king eventually accepted this document, but it is widely believed that he simply believed that he was reasserting ancient freedoms and granting nothing new. One of the main supporters of the petition was a staunch opponent of the king called John Pym, who later became parliamentary leader. Tensions increased further when, in 1629, parliament regarded a dispute over the continued collection of royal customs as an illegal contradiction of the Petition of Right. When the exasperated king ordered Parliament to adjourn, members retained the speaker, John Finch, in his chair so that the session could not formally end.

He was held there long enough for resolutions to be read against Charles's religious reforms and his collection of royal duties, a snub that was too much for the king to bear. So on March 10, 1629, Charles I dissolved parliament and arrested some of the ringleaders who had been behind the riots, inadvertently turning them into martyrs and providing a rallying cry for those who opposed absolute rule. Once parliament, which would be the source of revenue, was dissolved, the king made peace with his foreign enemies and embarked on a period of exclusive rule. To his supporters, it was "Personal Government", but to his enemies, it was the more sinister-sounding "Eleven Year Tyranny".

There is a general assumption that this decade-long period must have been bad by its very nature. While many events during these twilight years of peace led directly to the conflicts of the 1640s and 1650s, they were not as horrific as often portrayed. In England, personal government began quite positively. While the hardcore Puritans (radical Protestants who were convinced that the Reformation was only half done) thought that the so-called Arminianism of the High Church was the work of the devil, the common man was not so against it. Many ordinary people responded quite positively to the more formal approach to religion and readily embraced the moderate reforms of William Laud in the early 1630s.

Even Henrietta Maria became more docile and it is clear that Personal Government was a happy moment for the royal family in a personal sense. The queen even gave birth to a boy named Charles in May 1630, a boy who,

three

decades later, would be king of England in his own right. The birth of young Charles was supposedly celebrated with great enthusiasm in the

three

kingdoms

over which the Stuart dynasty had sovereignty, with bonfires lit in the baby's honour. It must have been a happy time that the royals would soon remember with sadness. Later, as a widow in her native France, Mary described her feelings during the golden years of the 1630s, stating that "I was the happiest and luckiest of queens, for not only did I have all the pleasures the heart could desire , but I had a husband who adored Me.' In continental Europe, the situation calmed somewhat during Personal Rule with the death of Gustavus Adolphus at Lutzen in 1632.

Despite the Swedish king's reputation as a hero of Protestantism, the stagnation that occurred after his death began to Decrease the level of religious fear and paranoia felt in English society. The Catholic dominance of the Thirty Years' War during the 1620s had raised the specter of another invasion of the British Isles. deteriorated significantly, if it was ever possible. Meanwhile, Charles proved to be a defender of theatre, painting, architecture, music and other aspects of high culture in general, a Capuchin priest named Father Cyprien informed his. superiors in France that "England is an abundant country and has no taxes; the inhabitants lead a luxurious life, far removed from the poverty of other places." However, as we will see, not everything was going well in England.

Despite the queen's growing contentment, her zealous Catholicism was to be an insurmountable problem for Charles. No matter how hard he tried, suspicious Protestant skeptics would always believe that Mary was trying to use her position to bring England back into the clutches of Rome. The queen's numerous Catholic attendants who had accompanied her to England also proved to be a problem, although not in Charles's opinion. In fact, the king seemed to find the Catholic courtiers quite charming and was able to relax in their company. While that may be the case, it is crucial to point out in Charles' defense that he does not appear to have “become Catholic” in any way, but rather that he had polarized interests that made it seem like he was.

Specifically, he was tolerant of Catholics and an enemy of extreme Puritans, whom he and his new Archbishop of Canterbury saw as a threat. Upon ascending to that position in 1633, Laud began to overstep his authority and make matters worse for almost everyone who did not share his own views on church matters. In addition to his papal innovations to the Church of England, which convinced many Puritans that they were gradually being handed over to the Catholic Church on a silver platter, Laud also repeatedly prosecuted Puritans and opponents of "episcopacy," the rule of a church. by the bishops. A trial in 1637 became famous for its brutality, involving three men named John Bastwick, WilliamPrynne and Henry Burton.

They were ridiculed for their defiance of Laud and had their ears cut off; Prynne had already suffered this punishment in 1634, so his face was marked with the letters S.L., or "seditious slanderer." This horrible torture did not have the effect Laud wanted, and even moderate Protestants saw the trio as martyrs. For them, it was becoming clearer what was happening. Vile Catholics were allowed to practice outdoors, while good and pious Protestants were persecuted. William Laud would shortly after cause the spark that would finally set England on fire. As the Venetian ambassador said of him: “This plague may be the one that finally disturbs the kingdom.” Despite the largely peaceful and tranquil nature of Charles's first personal rule, the need for money had not diminished in the slightest.

Unwilling to call another parliament to grant him subsidies, a series of creative measures were used to raise royal funds while avoiding Westminster. Unsurprisingly, these clever legal tricks were seen by parliament as blatant petty cash theft. The first of these measures was the sale of monopolies over a product or industry to an individual or company, exploiting a loophole in the law that prohibited it. Despite raising over £30,000 a year for the king, this policy infuriated almost everyone else. Merchants excluded by the monopoly were upset because they could not trade, and regular workers were upset because, under monopolies, prices tended to rise in exchange for inferior products.

The most infamous was the soap monopoly. Nicknamed "Papal Soap," this product supposedly blistered the hands of those who used it and, due to the monopolistic company's Catholic manufacturing board, was said to also blister the souls of Protestants. Charles also began reintroducing outdated medieval laws in strange ways, reviving old fines on knights, people who lived in royal forests, and people who built houses outside designated areas in London. These fines were originally designed to force the fined individual to stop a certain action, for example, leaving the forest. But Charles did not want the individual to stop the action, because he wanted to continue fining them and collecting the money.

While this was a technically legal and intelligent use of the letter of the law, it went against the spirit of the law and was widely viewed as unfair. The king's most famous fundraising measure was called "ship money", which was reintroduced in its original form in 1634. It basically served as an emergency financial tax in case of invasion, allowing the king to raise money if he did not there was time to call parliament. The maritime counties would contribute funds for the construction of ships which, in theory, would then be used in the defense of those countries. It was a fair system if employed as intended, but of course Charles I found a way to make it despised.

With the support of the meddlesome Archbishop Laud, Charles extended the collection of ship money to inland areas as well, areas that were traditionally exempt due to their lack of coastline. Furthermore, raising the boat money was an emergency fundraiser, and it was not a true emergency. However, the king avoided this by having his lawyers mention an ancient statute that dictated that it was the king who determined what was or was not an emergency. So, the king received the money from him at the beginning. However, when the tithing of ship money was repeated year after year, it became a huge problem for parliament.

After all, annual monetary tithes are actually taxes, and taxes could only be legally levied with parliamentary consent, no matter how hard the king tried to legally declare that it was not a tax. Naturally, all of this generated intense resistance from individuals such as John Hampden, whose actions in 1637 challenging Ship Money gave him a reputation as a defender of individual liberty. He also linked the parliamentary cause to property rights. Throughout the latter part of his personal rule, opposition began to grow increasingly against King Charles I. However, this opposition could not be channeled into any significant change due to the irregular and infrequent intervals at which parliament met.

However, this situation would soon change due to growing unrest in the north of Scotland, where the meddling of one Archbishop Laud was about to spark a war. The decentralized and radically Protestant church of Scotland, known as the Presbyterian church, had deep roots in the country's lowlands and parts of the highlands. The Scots clung lovingly to their native faith, so when Charles and his administration attempted to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer on them by royal decree, England's northern neighbor began to implode. Nationalist sentiment was stoked among all classes, from leading Scottish nobles to servant girls, one of whom threw a stool at the minister in St Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh when she attempted to read the Anglican book.

An organized response came on 29 February 1638, when Scottish lords signed the National Covenant: a promise to defend the native Scottish religion at all costs. This covenant pledged loyalty to the king, but on condition that the Presbyterian church be maintained in its undisturbed form. This Covenant circulated around Scotland and gained enthusiastic support on all fronts, and its adherents became known as “Covenanters.” Over the next year, attempts to achieve a negotiated solution failed and war became inevitable. As a result, both sides began to gather their armies, the highly motivated Scots more quickly than the English, many of whom were actually sympathetic to the Scottish cause.

Crucially, this warlike attitude began to push Charles's finances to the limit. To further complicate matters, many of his aristocratic financiers were Catholic. The First Bishops' War of 1639 was brief and inconclusive, ending with the Pacification of Berwick, which both sides realized would not end the conflict. Then both the Scots and the English began to prepare for their resumption. However, Charles's war fund had been depleted and, with all his sources of funding exhausted, on April 13 he was forced to convene what would become known as the "Short Parliament", the first in eleven years. . However, after only three weeks of stalemate and frustration on both sides, the king dissolved parliament again on 5 May 1640.

Charles immediately resumed collecting the hated "ship's money" to finance his war. The Second Episcopal War of 1640 was a complete disaster for the king. A Scottish army of 20,000 Covenanters led by the highly competent Earl of Leven managed to overtake the English and, soon after, defeated them at the Battle of Newburn. After what was the first Scottish victory on English soil since 1388, Leven occupied the northeast of England. As a note, the Earl of Leven, also known as Alexander Leslie, had spent the previous decade fighting in the Thirty Years' War in the service of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. We previously covered his contribution to the Siege of Stralsund.

To end this disastrous conflict, Charles signed the Treaty of Ripon, the terms of which required the king to pay the Scots £850 a day to maintain their occupation. Now burdened by this new financial drain on top of that of his own army, Charles was forced once again to call a parliament. Holding its first session on 3 November 1640, it would become known as the "Long Parliament", because it would not be formally dissolved until March 1660. This time, the parliament was almost entirely united against the king and the more radical Puritan elements within him. . Led by the Earl of Warwick, it began to dominate affairs.

His radical allies tried and executed the Earl of Strafford, Charles's first minister, initiated lengthy legal proceedings against Archbishop Laud, and obtained other unprecedented concessions from the Crown. All of these demands and more were set out in the Great Claim, a document of grievances and conditions, the most crucial of which would have deprived the king of many traditionally royal rights and privileges. Anyway, it didn't look like Charles was going to accept any further restrictions on his power, but now an external factor intervened and made everything much worse. In October 1641 a Catholic revolt led by Felim O'Neill of Kinard broke out in Ireland.

Thousands of Protestants were already dead and many more were refugees, it was clear that an army would be needed to quell the Irish. But under whose authority would the army be formed? Parliament no longer trusted the king for military force, fearing that he would use the army against them, while the king did not accept control of parliament for the same reason. For some reason, perhaps because Charles had uncovered evidence that his enemies in parliament had been conspiring with the Covenanters, Charles marched to the House of Commons with 400 soldiers on 5 January 1642. There he attempted to arrest five MPs: John Pym, John Hampden, Arthur Haselrig, Denzil Holles and William Strode, the alleged ringleaders of his imagined covenanting conspiracy.

When this attempt failed embarrassingly, the royal family quickly left London and headed to Windsor Castle, fearing that the London mobs supporting Parliament would rage against them. From that point on, King Charles and his Westminster opponents slowly approached

civil

war, with neither side willing to give in and waiting for the other to do so first. Charles was able to convince many of his English and Welsh subjects that he was defending their traditional constitution and the doctrine of the Elizabethan church, while parliament argued that the king should be deprived of his remaining constitutional powers, since it was clear that he could Its use cannot be trusted.

This also attracted many supporters, as did the widespread Puritan desire in parliament to undertake radical religious reform. In the end, both sides gained enough support to take the final step toward

civil

war. In early 1642, Charles had moved his court north to the city of York. In an attempt to take control of the situation in Ireland and assume its own military authority, Parliament unconstitutionally issued the Militia Ordinance in March 1642, allowing them to raise an army and appoint their commanders. They elected the staunch anti-royalist Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex whose father had been executed after an attempted coup against Elizabeth I.

Now needing an army of his own to counter that of his enemies at Westminster, Charles approved the equally unconstitutional Array Commission, which allows 'commissioners' chosen by the king, usually local nobles, to recruit troops from their own regions to serve in the royal army. As the twin armies slowly began to grow, Charles marched from his base at York to the armory city of Hull, arriving at its gates on 29 April. The city contained a large quantity of weapons and ammunition, enough to supply the royalist army's next campaign if necessary. As it turned out, Charles was out of luck.

The governor of Hull, Sir John Hotham, had turned to the parliamentary cause and closed the doors to the king, forcing his majesty to retire in humiliation and finally ending up in Nottingham. It was there that, on August 22, 1642, the king officially raised his royal standard on the castle hill. In what many thought was a bad omen for the coming confrontation, a storm toppled the banner the following night. The campaign started slowly. On 9 September, Parliament-appointed commander Essex established a headquarters at Northampton with the aim of intercepting Charles's army with his own and preventing any Royalist march on London.

Meanwhile, the king was still in a somewhat unstable situation. With only five infantry regiments and 500 cavalry soldiers at the time, the king's army needed more men. To obtain them, Charles set out from Nottingham on 13 September and marched west through Derby, Uttoxeter, Stafford and Wellington, finally reaching Shrewsbury on the 20th. This position allowed the Royalists to absorb more units than Charles's commissioners. They had recruited in North Wales and Lancashire, increasing their army to a viable size. While this was happening, the Royalist horse under the experienced command of Prince Rupert took up position at Bridgnorth, with the aim of protecting any possible Parliamentary attack on the main army.

Prince Rupert was the son of Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate, who had failed to win the Bohemian throne in 1618, essentially starting the Thirty Years' War. After being captured by the Holy Roman Empire in a military campaign, Rupert was freed thanks to the diplomatic maneuvers of his uncle, Charles I. He subsequently traveled to England and gratefully joined the English king's army as a commander. ofextremely competent cavalry. Essex subsequently attempted to prevent a Royalist advance towards London and deter further Royalist reinforcements by marching towards Worcester. As the bulk of Parliament's field army lumbered through the scattered villages of the Midlands, Essex sent two regiments of cavalry ahead to secure the western bank of the River Severn.

However, when around a thousand Parliamentary horsemen encountered a similar number of Rupert's royalist horsemen at Powick Bridge, the former were quickly defeated and driven away by the prince's superior tactics. This was the first real engagement of the civil war and was, according to MP Hugh Peters: “Where England's sorrows began.” Buoyed by this initial victory, the now expanded Royalist army began to march out of Shrewsbury on 12 October with London as its ultimate objective: Charles would march towards the "Vipers' Nest" and end the war here and now. A week later, Essex began his march eastwards in pursuit of him, eventually reaching the vicinity of Kineton with the aim of protecting Banbury, while Charles and his army carried out operations from the nearby town of Edgecote.

Due to the two sides' inexperience in warfare, inefficient scouting had not alerted either side to the other's presence so close. A Royalist war council at Edgecote, held on the 22nd, decided that a brigade of 4,000 men would attempt to seize Banbury the following day. As night fell, the king's army was dispersing into billets around Wormington Hills, while at around the same time, Essex's army finally reached Kineton. While Charles was staying at the house of Sir William Chancie, Prince Rupert traveled to Wormleighton and, apparently by chance, managed to capture a quartermaster party of the Army of Essex, which was nearby.

After extracting information from the prisoners, Rupert sent some mounted scouts to Kineton, who returned at midnight and confirmed that the entire Parliamentary army was there. At 3 a.m. on October 23, Charles knew the Essex was in the area, and an hour later, exhausted officers began sending orders to their men for a general meeting near the heights of Edgehill. At this time, the king's royalist army was between Essex and London, meaning it could have marched towards London relatively unopposed. However, Charles and his advisors did not back down from the confrontation and decided to make a 180-degree turn, eventually meeting the Roundhead army near Edgehill, three miles southeast of Kineton.

On the afternoon of 23 October, the armies of Parliament and the King were now facing each other on a section of arable land and grassland just northwest of the main slopes. It seemed to everyone present on both sides that the decisive battle of the war was near. With their battle formation formed on the level ground just in front of Radway, Charles I's royalists organized their army into two battle lines, opting to deploy in the Swedish-style rather than Dutch-style checkerboard formation, which would allow the second line regiments to form a continuous front if necessary. The infantry brigades in the front line, from left to right, were led by Henry Wentworth, Richard Feilding and Charles Gerard, while those in the rear were led by Sir Nicholas Byron and John Bellasis.

They all appear to have been about the same size, for a total infantry force of just over 9,000 men. In front of them were the Essex infantry, formed into three large but poorly formed brigades of approximately 4,000 men each for a total of 12,000 feet. The central brigade took a mainly defensive position behind a small hill, while the two on the flanks were slightly in front. Most of the cavalry from both sides of the battlefield were present on Prince Rupert's Royalist right wing. He maintained overall command on this flank, had a unit of one thousand dragoons and opposed James Ramsay's Parliamentarian cavalry.

Also on this side of the battlefield was a mobile infantry unit of Parliamentary dragoons and musketeers hidden to lay an ambush in a nearby hedgerow. On the other flank, the slightly fewer royalist cavalry under Henry Wilmot engaged those commanded by the Duke of Bedford. It is said that King Charles visited every unit of his cavalry and all of his infantry formations to review his troops and encourage them for the coming battle. He even wished to ride with his army, but was persuaded to retreat to the rear with his small reserve of life-saving cavalry, most of whom had persuaded the king to allow them to join Rupert's charge.

The first major battle of the English Civil War finally began at 2 p.m. with an artillery duel. None of the bombardments, which lasted an hour, caused major losses and served rather as a noisy prelude to the real battle. While this was happening, the dragoons of Rupert's far right wing were able to discover and eventually repel the roundhead ambushers within the hedge, providing the main cavalry force a free run towards the enemy. With Essex's army unwilling to move first, the fighting began as both wings of Royalist cavalry launched a thunderous frontal charge against their opposition. Using the latest direct charge cavalry shock tactics imported from the Continent by Prince Rupert, the king's horsemen on both flanks swept aside the parliament cavalry, who were still using stationary Dutch tactics of firing from the saddles.

A unit of Parliamentary troops even defected and joined the royalists. With both of Essex's mounted wings withdrawn from the field, it seemed the time was right for the king's horse to turn and deliver the coup de grace against the parliament's flank and rear. However, due to the indiscipline of their commanders and individual soldiers who were flushed with the glory of victory, they continued to pursue the defeated enemy. Historians believe that if the Royalist cavalry had stopped, regrouped and charged at this point, the English Civil War could have come to a decisive end, but it did not and the opportunity was lost.

With almost all horsemen now off the field, both infantry forces formed a single battle line and prepared to advance. The musketeers fired and softened the opposite foot, before the pikemen, wielding their 16-foot-long weapons, came into contact and engaged in the so-called "pike push," a shoving fight during which the two sides literally They pushed each other until one broke. The better equipped parliamentary lackeys managed to gain a slight advantage and casualties began to slowly increase on both sides. Now that all the Royalist cavalry had victoriously left the field, two units of Parliamentary reserve cavalry under Sir William Balfour and Philip Stapleton, who had previously been hidden behind a small hill, attacked the flanks of Byron's unit.

After subsequently breaking into the Royalist centre, Balfour managed to disable some of the enemy artillery pieces. Without knowing it, they had also been very close to capturing the king's children: Charles and his brother James. In the midst of the fighting, the king's royal standard was captured by Parliamentary infantry, but was later recaptured by a Royalist cavalry officer. By late afternoon, the inexperienced soldiers on both sides were shaken by the experience of battle, and in the evening Rupert's cavalry returned and stabilized the situation. Neither side had any more desire to fight and both retreated at nightfall. When morning came, the royalists had withdrawn from the field and the battle ended in a stalemate.

The 1,500 dead soldiers were a small number of casualties compared to the horrors on the mainland, mainly due to the bitterly cold night that followed the battle at Edgehill, which helped seal the fate of many wounded troops. After the brutal and inconclusive Battle of Edgehill, the Earl of Essex's battered and demoralized Parliamentarian army retreated north to the safety of Warwick Castle. Meanwhile, jubilant at the news of his army's victory, and urged by his cavalry commander, Prince Rupert, King Charles I ordered a measured advance towards London. He advanced through Banbury, which capitulated on 26 October, and then took Oxford, a city that would become the beating heart of Royalist causes during the first war.

While the main armies of both factions attacked and parried each other's attacks near the great capital of England, the embers of the conflict also burst into flames in the outlying counties. In the north, the Earl of Newcastle, Charles's appointed military governor of the region, raised a small but disciplined army and confronted the parliamentarian Lord Fairfax and his prodigious son and second-in-command, Sir Thomas. Throughout 1642, Newcastle gradually gained the upper hand in Yorkshire, pushing the anti-cavalry forces back to Selby. He was such a success that in December the earl even received royal thanks for his services. In the west of the country, Royalist and Parliamentarian forces fought a small-scale war of raids and counter-raids near the Welsh border, a situation that would continue well into 1643.

In this theatre, too, the king's men gained the advantage. As the war continued on the periphery, the king's main army resumed its march towards London after stopping at Reading to consolidate. However, this delay allowed Essex to overtake his opponent by passing through Northampton and reaching London before the Royalists arrived. The armies clashed again on 11 November, when Royalist troops under Rupert captured and severely maimed two regiments of Parliamentary cavalry near Brentford, a key staging point on the road to London. Just as they had done at Edgehill, the prince's victorious troops went too far instead of consolidating his position.

This time, instead of simply taking Brentford as a prelude to moving on to London, his men sacked it. While this looting was mild compared to the ravages of the Thirty Years' War on the continent, the inhabitants of nearby towns began to form an army of citizens prepared to resist further attacks. As the Royalists approached the village of Turnham Green, just a few miles from London, they were opposed by a motley army of 24,000 Parliamentarians made up of men from the capital's trained bands, the defeated Essex Army and hastily armed civilians. Against this defensive bastion, Charles's army could do nothing.

The Royalist hosts were already short of supplies and still depleted in numbers after Edgehill, and furthermore, if the apparently imminent "Battle of Turnham Green" became a real battle, the massacre of the common people of London, however armed, would was, it would probably change the situation. country against its king even more. So, after an incredibly tense standoff that lasted most of the day, the royalist army turned around and retreated at nightfall. This was a crucial moment in the war, because the royalists had failed to retake the city, and its enormous wealth, industry, ports and strategic value would remain the cornerstone of parliamentary power.

After this anticlimax, Charles dispersed his army to winter quarters in Oxford and the surrounding towns, where support for the king was most pronounced. During that winter, the famous university city was transformed into an alternative military capital for the royalist cause. As the king's army put down roots for the cold season, Essex's still numerically superior force concluded the year by besieging and capturing Reading. After this, with disease and many other problems plaguing both armies, a stalemate ensued. Essex spent the winter in the Thames Valley, where his army was inactive until the campaign season of the following year.

To further protect the capital, civilians began digging earthworks and other defenses. By early 1643, it was clear that any chance of a quick knightly victory had been extinguished. On 23 January 1643, a Parliamentarian force under Sir Thomas Fairfax raided a Royalist garrison of 1,500 men at Leeds under Sir William Saville. After a quick two-hour battle, the royalists were defeated and the survivors retreated to Wakefield for the night. The sullen appearance of the defeated and oppressed royalists at Leeds frightened Wakefield's own garrison, and by nightfall this town too was abandoned. The next day, Fairfax's men occupied Wakefield; With Leeds and Wakefield taken, a line of communication was opened between Sir Thomas and his father.

Sir Thomas would remain at Riding until the end of March, when he was recalled to Selby. Meanwhile, Newcastle and his forces returned to York. Here, his command faced two tasks beforeable to refocus his attention on Lord Fairfax. First, he sent General James King with a detachment of horse troops to escort an ammunition convoy from Newcastle to York. On 1 February the convoy was ambushed by a salient force from the Scarborough garrison, led by the town's parliamentary governor, Sir Hugh Cholmley, at Yarum Bridge. Although Cholmley's forces had the advantage of good terrain, they were repulsed in the field.

Soon after, Cholmley would defect, declare his allegiance to King Charles, and transfer much of the East Riding of Yorkshire to Royalist control. The immediate concern for Charles was the lack of military resources, particularly gunpowder and matches. His wife, Henrietta Maria, was in the process of transporting hundreds of barrels of these, other supplies and money to Oxford from the Netherlands. However, until he received these critical ammunition, the main Royalist army was unable to undertake any proper offensive. If none of the major southern port towns could be captured, the Queen's convoy had to dock at the northern coastal town of Bridlington, which at the time was under the control of Newcastle.

For the moment, a wedge of territory controlled by the Parliamentarians stood between the king and his much-needed supplies, a fact that made the Yorkshire campaign of 1643 even more vital. While the Queen resided in York, Newcastle fought the two Fairfaxes for supremacy over the valuable 'clothing towns' of Yorkshire. In an early spring campaign, it looked like the royalists were going to maintain their hegemony in the north. Lord Fairfax found himself in a precarious situation at Selby and had little support. With Newcastle's main army at York and the deserter Cholmeley controlling much of the East Riding, Fairfax's power now lay solely in the West Riding.

Sir Thomas Fairfax was ordered to bring as many men as he could to join him at Sherburn, as Newcastle's forces were in a good position to intercept them on their way to Leeds. Sir Thomas soon returned from the West Riding, bringing a small force of musketeers and horses, supplemented by a large body of club members: local volunteers armed with whatever weapons they could find. Sir Thomas was tasked with creating a diversion for his father's march by engaging the small Royalist garrison at Tadcaster. During the march, his troops passed through the ancient medieval battlefield of Towton before heading to the outskirts of Tadcaster.

The Royalist garrison of 3 to 4,000 men, seeing Sir Thomas's great host approaching, quickly abandoned the town into the hands of the Roundheads. Newcastle had planned to send a large contingent of horse to intercept Lord Fairfax's march, but with Tadcaster fallen, he feared that his intelligence reports were wrong and that, instead of advancing towards Leeds, Lord Fairfax was actually moving against him at York. . With this line of thought in mind, Newcastle deployed his army in an order of battle at Clifton Moor. The diversion by Sir Thomas's order had worked perfectly, causing the royalists to question their enemy's movements and intentions.

However, finding Tadcaster abandoned, Sir Thomas opted to destroy the enemy earthworks in the town, causing many delays while a sizable contingent of Royalists crossed the River Wharfe at Thorpe Arche, just north of Tadcaster, and advanced rapidly towards assumption. The Royalists were led by Colonel George Goring, who was an able, if often erratic, gentleman. Sir Thomas's force marching against the royalists was slightly larger than Goring's, but Sir Thomas only had 150 cavalry compared to Goring's complement of around 1,000 cavalry and dragoons. The rest of the parliamentary command was made up of infantry, musketeers and cudgels. Sir Thomas faced a difficult task: retreating in the face of an enemy numerically superior in horsemen across two large areas of open ground: Bramham Moor and Winn Moor.

The area of ​​Winn Moor closest to the village of Seacroft was known locally as Seacroft Moor. The Roundheads began their march towards Bramham Moor, with the Royalist horse in pursuit. To compensate for his numerical inferiority by using country roads, Fairfax intended to hold off the Royalists long enough for his foot units to reach the enclosures between Bramham Moor and Winn Moor. Sir Thomas continued his steady retreat until his foot had enough time to cross Bramham Moor and was incensed to discover that his foot troops had not moved an inch from his positions. With the Royalists rapidly approaching, Sir Thomas opted to split his foot companies into two divisions, sending them across the Moor, protecting his rear with three horse troops.

By this time the Royalists had deployed on the Moor in three equal contingents and were continuing to follow the Roundheads' retreat, maintaining a distance of several hundred metres. Soon Sir Thomas's forces reached the enclosures between Bramham Moor and Winn Moor, but the situation quickly deteriorated as the men reached the town of Kidhall. Here, men broke ranks to seek a drink on that hot day, and the cohesion of the parliamentary forces was disturbed. A critical point in the battle was being reached. As Sir Thomas' column emerged from the enclosures onto the moor, Goring's men followed a few hundred yards north.

Before the Parliamentarians could reach the safety of the village of Seacroft, Goring turned his men into battle lines and charged into Roundhead's disorganized ranks. A thousand horsemen rushed upon Sir Thomas's men, who stood little chance in their exposed and very disordered columns. The parliamentarians, greatly pressured by the royalist horse, soon fell into panic and disorder. The militia club members fled almost immediately, while the remaining companies of infantry and musketeers offered a slightly better defense. But when the infantry fired their muskets, they found themselves defenseless against the royalist horsemen. Vastly outnumbered, Sir Thomas's mounted troops decided to abandon their comrades in the foot companies to their fate.

Most of Roundhead's horsemen managed to retreat, but few companies of foot and musketeers were able to escape their current situation. The Parliamentarians had been completely defeated at the Battle of Seacroft Moor. More than eight hundred prisoners were taken and between 100 and 200 men were killed. Sir Thomas Fairfax would describe the battle as "the greatest loss we ever received." Unwilling to be defeated so easily, the Fairfax took revenge on him in May. On the night of the 21st, Sir Thomas Fairfax stormed Wakefield in an excellently executed night assault, capturing Goring in the process. The setback was a shock to Newcastle and meant that the Yorkshire royalists were unable to spare troops to help their queen return to Oxford.

A few weeks earlier, Essex had mobilized Parliament's main army in the Thames Valley and used it to besiege Reading, a vital link in the defensive line protecting Charles's makeshift capital at Oxford. Essex took the city on April 25 after a blockade that lasted almost two weeks. Unfortunately for the Lord General, his overly cautious nature and a massive outbreak of typhus among his soldiers crippled the Roundhead army, squandered their strategic initiative, and gave the Royalist forces in the area some much-needed respite. On 1 June, Henrietta Maria left York accompanied by 5,000 men and, despite being clearly sighted by Essex scouts, she was not intercepted.

As the supply convoy moved slowly south, the northern campaign reached a climax when Newcastle's 10,000 men cornered and crushed Thomas Fairfax's three and a half thousand at Adwalton Moor, securing Royalist control over Yorkshire and besieging MPs in Hull6. Now free from the pressure of the Thames Valley, Prince Rupert, victorious in many small cavalry raids and skirmishes, rode north to escort his queen the rest of the way. He finally entered Oxford on July 14 to enthusiastic applause and ringing of bells. Everything was going according to the king, but the “royal summer” had not yet reached its peak. The main threat to Oxford in 1643 was Sir William Waller's newly formed Western Association Army, which operated in and around the area of ​​modern Wiltshire and the south-west, threatening to sever Royalist communication with Wales, a key recruiting location. .

He was opposed in the West by the brilliant royalist commander Sir Ralph Hopton, an old friend and comrade of Waller's with whom he had fought in the Thirty Years' War decades earlier. He was also a notorious disciplinarian, preaching the firm but fair motto: "Pay well, command well, hang well." If there was any chance of an eastward union between Hopton's Royalist army and Charles's force at Oxford for a combined offensive on London, Parliamentary control in the West had to be smashed first. On 16 May, Hopton had defeated the Roundheads at the Battle of Stratton in Cornwall, and his rapid advance into Devon had encouraged the king to send him reinforcements under Prince Maurice and the Marquess of Hertford.

On 4 June, Hopton's army was reinforced at Chard, raising their combined strength to 4,000 feet, 2,000 cavalry and 300 dragoons, as well as 16 guns. In the following campaign, Hopton, Hertford and Prince Maurice would share equal command of their army, combining their dignity, rank and military skills to form an effectively led fighting force. Hertford nominally ruled through his social status, while Hopton led in the field and Prince Maurice oversaw the army's horse contingent. The Royalist plan for the summer campaign in the West was based on building a strong and defensible base of operations by taking Wells, Taunton, Bridgwater and Dunster Castle, before applying pressure against the Parliamentarians' main rallying point. in Bath.

Cavalry raids and field skirmishes between Royalists and Parliamentarians broke out as Hopton's army converged on its objectives. On 9 June a major skirmish broke out south of Chewton Mendip, in which Prince Maurice was temporarily taken prisoner. A three-week pause then ensued, during which Waller hoped to augment his army at Bath with additional reinforcements. The Parliamentary cavalry was reinforced by a regiment of cuirassiers arriving from London under Sir Arthur Heselrige, bringing the strength of the Parliamentary cavalry to 2,500, but Waller urgently needed infantry. By the first week of July, Waller could field no more than 1,500 footmen against Hopton's 4,000. The royalists entered Bradford-on-Avon on 2 July, approaching five miles south-east of Bath.

In response, Waller moved his army to Claverton Down to stop the enemy advance. On the 3rd, Hopton's regiments began to drive back Waller's pickets and other outlying detachments. With pressure from Prince Maurice, whose horse regiments attacked Claverton, and Hopton's foot regiments pursuing Waller's troops through Batheaston, the Parliamentarians were forced to make a hasty retreat to Bath. At midnight Hopton assessed his situation and considered passing Batheaston towards the south slope of Lansdown Hill. However, having only part of the army at his disposal, Hopted decided to wait until Prince Maurice's horse regrouped with him the next day. On the morning of July 4, the royalists approached Lansdown, only to discover that Waller's army had beaten them to it.

Waller's army was heavily posted on the top of Lansdown Hill. Holding a council of war with his co-commanders, Hopton decided that an attack on the position was beyond contemplation, but furthermore, remaining where they were would only lead to more casualties. Shortly after noon the Royalists retreated to Marshfield and Hopton covered their retreat from him. Waller knew that the Royalists would attempt to take action to capture Bath from the north by advancing along the ridge of Lansdown Hill. And so, shortly after dawn on July 5, he maneuvered his army along the Roman road, which runs through Lansdown, and established himself on the northern escarpment to counter a Royalist advance from Marshfield.

At the top of the hill, Waller ordered his foot companies to build crude parapets along the road up the hill, while simultaneously launching a cavalry screen to probe the Royalist outposts. Waller's horse troops soon located and engaged the Royalist outposts and began skirmishing with them, harassing them back to the Royalist main body at Marshfield. Spurred into action by this challenge, at 8:00 a.m. m., Hopton deployed his army and set it on the move towards Lansdown Hill. He used the Tog and Freezing hills as the axis of his advance on the Roundhead lines. Skirmishes continued inconclusively around Tog Hill for another twohours, but Hopton and his co-commanders knew they would gain little from these small actions other than depleting their limited supply of ammunition.

At ten in the morning, the royalists began to retreat to their camp at Marshfield to rethink their strategy. But before Hopton's army had advanced even a mile, Waller sent most of his squadrons of horse and dragoons in pursuit of him. The timing of his attack was perfect. Roundhead's horsemen caused waves of panic and confusion in the ranks of the royalist rearguard. Only a strong defense by Hopton's Cornish infantry regiments in the center and a timely intervention by Lord Carnaravon's Horse Regiment prevented Hopton's retreat from becoming a complete rout. Gradually, more and more Royalist units turned around and rushed to join the action ravaging Tog and Freezing Hills.

Finally, the parliamentarians were driven back after hours of bloody combat. The Parliamentarian horse squadrons were constantly pressed along Freezing Hill, and soon came under mortifying fire from Royalist cavalry and musketeers. Roundhead's ranks fell into a fit of confusion. However, the Parliamentarians soon recovered and put up stiff resistance, slowing Hopton's progress. By early afternoon, the Royalists were in firm control of the ground before Waller's position on Lansdown Hill. Hopton, however, was still not very enthusiastic about launching what he saw would be a costly frontal assault on Waller's prepared position on the high ground above the escarpment. As the Royalist troops waited for orders in the valley, they found themselves under intense artillery bombardment from the Parliamentary guns atop the hill.

Hopton's Cornish infantry regiments impatiently pleaded with Hopton to load Waller's guns. Finally he relented, Hopton ordered his cavalry and infantry regiments to assault the enemy position. The royalist horse charged down the center through Freezing Hill Lane as the musketeers attempted to drive the Roundheads out of the woods on either side of the road. It was hoped that the infantry would then be in a position to outflank Waller's line. Unfortunately for Hopton, the Royalist horse squadrons were driven back in the center with heavy losses, and it was only through Colonel Sir Bevil Grenville that they managed to maintain the momentum of the attack.

Seeing the Royalist squadrons in the center retreating in disarray, Grenville led his Cornish pikemen forward, advancing up the hill with musketeers supporting his left and cavalry supporting his right. With their movements partially concealed by a wall on the left side of the road, the Cornish pikemen steadily advanced to the top of the escarpment, where they came under murderous fire as they reached the top of the hill. The advance came to an abrupt halt and Sir Arthur Heselrige's cavalry regiment charged the stubborn Cornish men three times as the royalists desperately tried to hold on to their position on level ground.

Grenville died fighting at the head of his pikemen. During a decisive moment, Grenville's defense had broken the offensive spirit of the Parliamentary horse squadrons. Waller began to withdraw his men to cover behind a stone wall about 400 yards behind his breastworks; the royalists now faced the challenge of overcoming a strong parliamentary second line of defense. The battle was reaching a stalemate, as the exhausted royalists could not muster the strength to press forward against a second line of enemy defense and were subjected to even more withering fire. The pause did not last long and Waller decided to withdraw his army along Lansdown Hill back to Bath.

The weary Royalists, low on ammunition and unable to continue their hours-long battle with vigorous pursuit, allowed the Parliamentarians to retreat before them. However, the wheel of fortune turned quickly. When the knight commander inspected the battle's prisoners, he was injured by a powder magazine explosion and was temporarily knocked out of action. Early the next morning the royalists began to withdraw to Marshfield. The Battle of Lansdowne had ended in a major Royalist tactical victory, with Hopton holding the field at the cost of around 2 to 300 men killed and another 6 to 700 wounded. However, Waller believed that Lansdowne was a strategic victory for the parliamentary cause.

Although Waller had retreated in good order and given the field to Hopton, he had suffered relatively light casualties. The royalists had been stopped in their attempt to capture Bath, and were now more concerned with safely withdrawing their army intact than with conquering the Parliamentary fortress. After receiving reinforcements from Oxford, Charles's armies concluded their affairs in the west at the conclusive Battle of Roundway Down. Once again the Royalist advantage in horsemen paid off and their mounted charge broke the Parliamentary line. Many round-headed cavalry, terrified and fleeing, accidentally charged down a hidden 300-foot drop, since known as the bloody ditch.

With that, the Western Association Army was completely crushed. When news subsequently reached Oxford that his enemy's western army had been completely annihilated, Charles sent Prince Rupert with 5,500 soldiers to reinforce Hopton's army. This opportunistic campaign was probably intended to take Gloucester, but Waller's retreat into the city reinforced his defenses, making that goal unrealistic. So instead, the Royalist field army headed to Bristol, the second most populous city in England. It also had key metallurgical industries that could be used for the creation of weaponry and a small fleet that had potential as the beginning of a reborn navy. Rupert, 'whose name was half a conquest', arrived at Bristol unopposed on 23 July.

That day the Prince took up residence at Westbury College, two miles from Bristol. During the afternoon he led a reconnaissance party along the Avon from Durdham Down to Clifton Church to explore the town's western defences. Parliamentary forces at the nearby Brandon Hill fort soon opened fire on Rupert's party. Rupert opted to return to his camp to begin siege preparations and left a contingent of 200 musketeers, 100 pikemen and a regiment of dragoons under Colonel Henry Washington at Clifton Church. During the night, Washington's party left Clifton Church and confronted the Roundheads at Brandon Hill Fort, but were repulsed. More skirmishes across the lines continued throughout the day.

Meanwhile, south of the River Avon, Prince Maurice's Cornish army began digging trenches in preparation for the siege. Cannons were brought in from the rear to form siege batteries. On 24 July, Prince Rupert demonstrated outside the defenses of Bristol and sent an officer and a trumpeter to the city walls with a message for Colonel Nathaniel Fiennes, commanding the Bristol garrison. Rupert ordered Fiennes and his men to withdraw, but the colonel refused. Rupert crossed the Avon with his retinue the next day to meet Prince Maurice at a council of war to determine the best way to take Bristol. The main question was what was the best way to take the city: through a slow and methodical siege or with a direct assault on the works.

Prince Maurice and many of his officers in the Western Army implored Rupert to begin a traditional siege operation, but Rupert and his officers favored an immediate assault on the position. Ultimately, Rupert won and the stage was set for an assault on Bristol the following day. The plan for the assault on Bristol provided for an assault at dawn. To identify friend from foe between the two armies in the confusion of battle, the password "Oxford" was issued to the Royalist ranks, and each soldier was required to wear a green emblem or article of clothing. Prince Maurice's Cornish lackeys formed into three columns with the intention of storming the walls on either side of the temple gate.

The plan called for the various siege batteries to fire a signal at 4:00 a.m. However, at three in the morning on 26 July, impatient Cornish infantry columns began to attack. Seeing this, Prince Rupert ordered the signal guns to open fire, beginning the general assault. On the northeast side of the town, a brigade under Lord Gandison assaulted Stoke's Croft and Prior's Hill Fort, but were repulsed with heavy losses and Lord Gandison was mortally wounded. More bad news soon arrived when a small bomb placed at the gate of Stoke's Croft failed to explode. Colonel John Belasyse's brigade stormed the Windmill Hill fort, but without climbing ladders, they were unable to jump the wall and fill the ditches with sashes.

Seeing the brigade retreat in disorder, Prince Rupert personally rode to rally the regiments and bring them back to the line for a fresh attack on Windmill Hill, but they were still unable to advance. Colonel Henry Wentworth led his brigade into a hail of withering fire on Windmill Hill Fort and was soon repulsed. To the right of Wentworth's brigade, Colonel Washington and his dragoons were able to reach an angle in the wall, out of sight of the enfilading fire of the main forts. Wentworth's men soon followed Washington's example. The royalist column threw their grenades over the walls of the fort and stormed the parapet.

Heavy fighting broke out inside the fort and Royalist infantry broke down the walls to allow horse squadrons to follow. The Roundheads here, led by Major Hercules Langrish, were unable to stem the Royalist tide and soon fell back. Colonel Fiennes' Cavalry Regiment attempted to counter-attack, and an intense melee broke out around the Windmill Hill fort until the Parliamentarians were forced back and driven to the outskirts of the city. Using the momentum of the attack, Wentworth's brigade took up a fortified position known as "Essex Work", as its Roundhead garrison abandoned it after detecting the approaching Royalist foot. Back south of Bristol, the Cornish attack continued to advance towards the wall, pushing wagons into the moat to use as a makeshift fascia.

The Cornish infantry suffered especially heavy casualties attempting to scale the city walls, with many senior officers killed or wounded. Colonel Brutus Buck, at the head of his column, managed to escape from the walls before receiving a halberd blow that threw him into the ditch and mortally wounded him. Sir Nicholas Slanning and Colonel John Trevannion were shot dead and many other high-ranking field officers were seriously wounded. To the north, Belasye joined Wentworth's brigade, and his two units advanced against the town's defenses supported by Major General Sir Arthur Aston's horse detachment. The royalists soon encountered Bristol's inner fortifications, and the fighting centered on Frome Gate.

The Cavaliers desperately tried to open it against the determined resistance of the Roundheads. Among the parliamentary advocates at Frome Gate was a group of women led by Dorothy Hazzard. These women worked vigorously to reinforce the gate with bags of wool and earth to keep the royalists out. Rupert sent a message to Maurice asking for 1,000 feet of Cornwall to reinforce the assault on Frome Gate. As these troops surrounded the walls at 2:00 p.m. m., Colonel Fiennes began a conversation with Prince Rupert, seeking conditions to open the city to the royalists. Rupert immediately accepted Fiennes' offer to parley, hoping to avoid even greater losses with a new assault.

Meeting with Rupert, Fiennes reached an agreement to deliver Bristol at 10:00 p.m. m. that night, by which time the royalists controlled much of the city anyway. The Parliamentary garrison, under the terms of the articles of war, was allowed to leave Bristol and the officers and cavalry were allowed to keep their horses and swords, and all ranks were allowed to keep their personal belongings. However, the terms of the surrender agreement were soon broken, and the Roundheads soon found their belongings looted and looted, stripped of everything they could carry by the victorious Royalist troops as they departed Bristol.

The capitulation of Bristol was a blow to the royalist forces both morally and materially. Around 80 firearms, 1,700 barrels of gunpowder and 6,000 muskets were seized. But the cost of manpower had been high: some 500 royalists died in the attack. With momentum gained, a Royalist war council met on 4 August and agreed that the next target would be Gloucester itself. With a population of 5,000, he controlled the River Severn and communications from Oxford to South Wales. The royalist 10th army completely surrounded the city, but instead of thesurrender of their governor, Edward Massey, they were met with fierce resistance. Now facing an extensive siege, Charles's siege commander, the Earl of Forth, began a bombardment on the 13th.

When news of the Gloucester situation arrived, there was complete alarm in Parliament for fear that its loss could mean a total collapse. To remedy the situation, Essex's main army near London was quickly reinforced with an influx of fresh troops and trained bands from the city itself. Around this time, Edward Montagu, Earl of Manchester, was given command of the newly formed parliamentary army of the Eastern Partnership. He appointed an almost unknown cavalry commander, one Oliver Cromwell, as his second-in-command. On 25 August, Essex's expanded main army marched to save the besieged Parliamentarian stronghold in the west. Despite suffering multiple Royalist attempts to hinder the progress of his army, Essex reached Prestbury Hill, from where he could see the spiers of Gloucester's great cathedral, on 5 September.

From there, the Thames Army fired several cannons to alert the city's garrison that relief was at hand. On the same day, Charles's nearly month-long investment in Gloucester came to an end in total failure and his army retreated to Bristol. However, Essex's now vulnerable position gave the Royalists a great opportunity to win the war anyway. The presence of trained bands from London in the field army meant that if the knights could lead Essex into battle and defeat him, a significant portion of the capital's defenders would be lost with the destruction of the army. Realizing the danger, the Lord General attempted to deceive his arrogant opponents by advancing towards Tewkesbury, pretending as if he were going to march in a wide arc back to London using the northern route or intended to invade Wales.

When this ruse failed, Essex boldly fled to safety via the southern route3 on September 15. He nearly succeeded, but Prince Rupert's scouts detected the movement, overtook the Parliamentarians by a more direct route, and savagely attacked his dangerously spread army at Aldbourne Chase. This forced Essex to delay his march and allowed Charles's army to catch up with his own. The royalists occupied the town of Newbury on the gloomy afternoon of 19 September, thus placing themselves in a superior position between London and Essex, forcing the latter to rest on high ground south of the village of Enborne. Defying his usually cautious nature and unwilling to remain on the defensive, the Earl of Essex raised his army, consisting of 8,000 infantry and 6,000 cavalry, just before dawn.

The general gathered his vanguard, asked them if they were willing to fight, and received the answer: “Let us fall on them! “With God’s help, we will defeat them all.” With that, Essex led his vanguard of 4,000 infantry and a small number of mounted men around 6 a.m. toward the strategic height of Round Hill. The royalist forces had not properly reconnoitred the battlefield and therefore had not realized the importance of the escarpment. Thus, with relative ease, parliamentarians adopted the defensible position4. The cavalry army, consisting of 7,000 infantry and a formidable 7,500 cavalry, began to leave Newbury a few hours after the Parliamentarians met.

While the main force was organizing, the energetic Prince Rupert set out with 900 musketeers and some cavalry to take Round Hill himself. However, he was surprised to discover that the strategic point was strongly defended by some 2,500 Parliamentary soldiers, whose presence blocked the royalists. Realizing that he could not progress with his current strength, Rupert left the infantry there under Colonel George Lisle and returned to Newbury. News of the Roundheads' capture of Round Hill alarmed the arrogant leaders, but a quickly organized war council decided what the day's objectives and deployment would be. Once his plans were finalized, Charles I's royalist army began to deploy on a north-south axis in three main sections.

A relatively small number of troops under the overall command of William Vavasour were stationed on the right wing, in the enclosed valley of the River Kennet. In the center, attacking Round Hill, were Sir Nicholas and John Byron. Prince Rupert and most of the Royalist cavalry were deployed in an open area called Wash Common on the left, closer to the River Enborne. The second Stuart king of England raised his royal standard on a hill in the North Kennet Valley battlefield area. It was on this front that the first action of the day took place, provoked by Parliamentary artillery fire raining down from Round Hill.

Vavasour's royal regiments advanced in the closed terrain of the valley and between dense hedgerows, advancing on lands that were far more suitable for defense than attack. After a short, brief engagement on this northern flank, the Royalist foot was easily blunted with heavy losses. However, sensing an opportunity, the triumphant parliamentary foot launched its own attack. This advance gained some ground and managed to unbalance Vavasour's ranks, but the intervention of Charles's lifesaving cavalry blocked it. For the remainder of September 20, both sides avoided rapprochement on the northern front. On the approaches to Round Hill, the two Byrons and their respective infantry and cavalry units advanced uphill in an attempt to dislodge the Parliamentarians from the summit.

However, their march was detected and they encountered fierce resistance from the ranks of musketeers and culverins stationed. During the fierce fighting that broke out on the hill, an intellectual and pacifist aristocrat known as Lord Falkland, who fought for the royalists, was killed by a musket ball. Shortly afterwards, arrogant horsemen managed to defeat a section of the parliamentary center and came close to securing Round Hill. However, professional Essex reserve officers saw the danger, plugged the gap and disciplinedly used musket volleys to repel the horsemen. The king's forces were also stuck in a stalemate here. While brutal hand-to-hand combat was being fought at Round Hill, Prince Rupert was busy organizing 6,000 Royalist horses on Wash Common.

When the first line of cavalry was ready, he charged Sir Philip Stapleton's Parliamentary horse, which had not fully formed up on the opposite side of the common. Stapleton managed to put together a defense in time, using new delayed and short-range volley tactics to drive back the Royalist cavalry twice. However, amid the snapping of carbines and the clatter of axes against plate, Prince Rupert managed to turn the flank of the Parliamentarian cavalry on the third charge, forcing them back into Skinner's Green Lane. In the afternoon, reserve units of the London Trained Bands occupied the gap in Wash Common left by the cavalry, repulsing a scouting charge by Rupert's horse.

Instead, the royalists resorted to a massive artillery bombardment aimed at breaking the last parliamentary ranks. However, the supposedly inferior Trained Bands, who had no cover on the open plain, defied all expectations and stood their ground, maintaining their formation for many hours even in the face of massive but inaccurate culverin fire. However, this constant bombardment eventually weakened the brave parliamentary reserves. As Prince Rupert led a thunderous mounted charge across the northern sector of the common at around 4pm, Essex's trained bands began to break, breaking their line and threatening to cut the entire army in two. At precisely that moment, the Earl of Essex galloped bravely to the scene, riding through his retreating troops and inspiring them to turn and fight.

In one account, a cannonball is said to have landed just three feet from the Lord General, but personal intervention was necessary. The trained bands, particularly their Red and Blue units, turned and charged the royalists, reforming their formation and stabilizing the front. After some subsequent lighter fighting, both armies began to withdraw at 7 p.m. after a relentless fourteen-hour stalemate. Charles's forces withdrew to Newbury, where they spent the night and deliberated on what to do. The next morning, the royalists chose not to engage again, either because supplies of gunpowder had run out or because the high command simply lost its nerve.

Both armies lost roughly the same number of troops (1,300 each) and, although Rupert had come close to victory, Essex escaped back to London afterwards. Newbury was as tactically inconclusive as Edgehill had been the previous year. However, the battle would have far-reaching consequences. Although the king's armies dominated in all theaters as 1643 came to a close, the Parliamentary allies in the far north were about to change the nature of the entire war. The realistic summer was over. By the time October 1643 arrived, Charles I's two kingdoms had been embroiled in a bitter civil war for more than a year. The serious consequences of this violence slowly began to reveal themselves as the months passed, as atrocities against compatriots became even more common on both sides, while the “gentleman's war” of the initial war faded.

While the Earl of Essex and his royalist enemies were locked in the bloody First Battle of Newbury, political dealings between parliament and the Scottish Covenanter government were reaching a conclusion that would escalate the war to an even greater degree1. The Parliamentarians needed a strong military ally to win the war, and the Covenanters possessed an army ready to march. In exchange for a promise to implement the Presbyterian religious system in England, Scotland would help crush Charles' royalists2. After months of back-and-forth negotiations, the so-called "Solemn League and Covenant" was finalized on September 25, 1643. Meanwhile, the king was strengthening his forces for the upcoming engagement, while royalist soldiers, previously tied up in Ireland , they were beginning to return. home.

In early 1644, northern England came under decisive Royalist control through the efforts of William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle. All this changed on January 19 when the Covenanter army, consisting of 18,000 infantry, 3,000 cavalry, 600 dragoons and 120 cannon crossed the River Tweed and invaded English territory4, entering the war on the side of Parliament. It was led by the illustrious Lutzen veteran: Alexander Leslie, Earl of Leven. Leven's advance towards Newcastle was almost unopposed, but Cavendish5 quickly received news of the invasion and managed to overtake the Scots in the city, mainly because Leven had to wait for his heavy guns to arrive by ship.

When he finally arrived before the city walls on February 3, he found many of the suburbs burned to the ground by Cavendish's defending forces, who were now reinforced by 5,000 men. However, the city of Tyneside was besieged. However, constant harassment of Scottish supply lines by veteran Royalist cavalry and the lack of shelter caused by the defender's scorched earth tactics forced Leven to depart with the bulk of his army on the 22nd. six regiments of the Covenanter army remained to continue the siege. Unwilling to let his enemy escape unhindered, Cavendish set out in pursuit of him with most of his own troops.

Over the next few weeks, Leven and Cavendish maneuvered around each other, unwilling to participate due to unfavorable terrain and bad weather. Finally, at the end of March, Leven engaged and defeated his enemy in a hand-to-hand battle near Sunderland, forcing him to flee in the direction of York. Due to this loss, the King of the North's forces needed immediate aid, and his main hope of obtaining such aid rested with Prince Rupert6, who set out for Yorkshire to relieve Cavendish's battered hosts. In a brilliantly executed campaign, Rupert's meager army broke a siege on the strategically crucial Royalist stronghold of Newark on March 22, and the prince nearly lost his life in the attempt.

Instead of continuing his march, the gallant knight retreated to his base at Shrewsbury to gather more men, but he barely had time to relax before terrible news arrived from the south. A week after Rupert's triumph in Nottinghamshire, William Waller took revenge on Roundway Down by defeating Hopton's Royalist army at the Battle of Cheriton, a defeat that ended any prospect of Royalist victory in the south. Royalist fortunes had even begun to deteriorate in Yorkshire, when on 12 April Sir Thomas Fairfax's army defeated John Belasye at the town of Selby and routed a significant part of York's intended garrison.

After receiving news ofWith the disaster unfolding, the Earl of Newcastle's forces marched their army for the second time in just under half a year, hoping to reinforce York's defenses before the Parliamentarians could get there. He once again succeeded, despite losing many stragglers and deserters along the way, reaching the royalist stronghold in the north on 15 April. Three days later, the Covenanter army approached Wetherby and met Sir Thomas Fairfax's Parliamentarian army, fresh from its victory at Selby. Together, starting on the 22nd, the allies besieged the great city in northern England. Charles I knew that if York fell, the North would fall.

To deal with the sudden strategic crisis their war effort now faced, leading Royalist commanders met at Oxford on 25 April for a council of war. After intense debate, Prince Rupert took the lead. It was decided that the remainder of Hopton's defeated army would be absorbed into Charles's central army at Oxford, and this newly reinforced force would remain on the defensive. Meanwhile, Rupert himself would gather several thousand troops and head north to relieve York. Once decided, Rupert returned to Shrewsbury on 6 May to begin gathering his own men. That same day, on the other side of England, the Eastern Partnership Army under Manchester and Cromwell took Lincoln, freeing them to begin marching into Yorkshire as well.

Rupert's march began at the end of the month with an attempt to reassert Royalist authority in Lancashire. He first bypassed the staunchly parliamentary city of Manchester, but subsequently seized and razed nearby Bolton. After the fighting for the city ended, there was no mercy and up to 1,000 soldiers and civilians were massacred. This massacre helped reinforce parliamentary propaganda. After all, if the king depended on such slaughter of Englishmen to win this war, was he really his king? At Bolton, Rupert also received a pleasant surprise when 5,000 Royalist cavalry joined his army from the northeast8. These were the Earl of Newcastle's horsemen who had been prudently dismissed before the siege began, as cavalry would be useless in such a situation.

When Rupert secured Liverpool7 and consolidated royalist control of Lancashire, the king ignored the southern defensive strategy and embarked on a military campaign in the region. It was a disaster that caused Oxford's defensive ring of garrisons to break down and forced Charles to flee to Worcester with Essex and Waller hot on his heels. At this point, the king, realizing that Prince Rupert's advice to consolidate and defend only in the south should not have been ignored, sent a series of ambiguous orders9 that essentially left Rupert to make his own decision. We will talk about this theater later. Upon receiving the communication, the knight-general interpreted the unclear order in his own way: he would relieve York and destroy the Parliamentarians and their Scottish allies before marching victoriously south to save the king.

After the campaign that was about to happen, he would carry that letter from the king for the rest of his life. Prince Rupert's relief army, now numbering about 14,000, set out to relieve York. News that the prince's army was only a day away caused the allies to hastily lift the siege. They withdrew to proactively engage the Royalist army and moved their large combined force to a hill near a village five miles south-west of York, known as Long Marston. The Knaresborough road, which Rupert was using to march his army, crossed immediately in front of this ridge with the River Nidd behind.

This made the direct route to York almost impossible for the royalists to navigate without having a dangerous enemy army threatening their flank. Rather than risk such an attack, the cunning prince resorted to deception. Just before dawn on 1 July, he saw Royalist horsemen advancing along the Knaresborough Road. To the Parliamentarians and Scots, it was evident that this cavalry force was Rupert's vanguard, with the obvious implication that his main army was a short distance away. Accordingly, they formed their men into battle formation and waited for the bulk of Rupert's army to arrive. However, the royalist "avant-garde" was just an illusion, luring Leven, Fairfax and the others into a false sense of security.

While he did everything a normal vanguard would be expected to do, Charles's illustrious nephew led the bulk of his army north to the town of Knaresborough, crossed the Ouse at Boroughbridge and camped in Galtres Forest at the to become night. Then his forces advanced further, dispersing a small detachment of enemy dragons into Nether Poppleton and securing a ship bridge there. Realizing that they had been outwitted11 and fearing that Rupert might cut off their supply lines to the south if he escaped them again, the bulk of Parliament's combined army began marching south towards Tadcaster, while their cavalry remained in position.

Marston Moor, covering the retreat. At around the same time, the Royalist cavalry, which Newcastle had previously ordered to leave the city, returned to York under the command of Lord George Goring and formally relieved the city. In a brilliant maneuver that was possibly one of the greatest of the entire civil war, Rupert had saved old Roman Eboracum without firing a single shot. Obeying what he thought was the king's order to relieve York, then defeat Parliament's army, and then travel south urgently, Prince Rupert almost immediately gathered his and Newcastle's men. Reinforced by the reluctant York garrison and his even more reluctant commanders, the prince marched towards Marston Moor and visibly challenged the enemy to a pitched battle.

In the early afternoon of 2 July 1644, two of the largest armies of the Civil War so far were lined up against each other on Marston Moor. The battlefield was bordered to the east by the village of Long Marston and to the west by Tockwith. The 28,000-strong Parliamentary army took up position on a high hill, on which Rupert significantly outnumbered the 18,000 royalists who were forced to occupy a lower section of the moor to the north. Their position was in front of an irregular ditch that would function as a useful defensive tie. On each of the Roundhead flanks, 3,000 English Parliamentary cavalry and 1,000 Scottish soldiers were arrayed in three battle lines, supported by interspersed foot musketeers.

The right wing, closest to Long Marston, was led by Sir Thomas Fairfax, while the left was under the command of Oliver Cromwell, accompanied by his increasingly lethal unit of mounted troops: the Ironsides. The mass of the parliament army consisted of 20,000 infantry soldiers in the center of the battle line. In the vanguard were units of Lord Ferdinando Fairfax's Yorkshire Army in the centre, troops from Manchester's Eastern Partnership Army on the left13 and a brigade of Scots on the right14. Behind them, in the second line, were more Manchester infantry and Leven Scots, and even more Covenanters were in reserve.

Supreme command of the entire army of both kingdoms fell to the Earl of Leven. Downhill, Prince Rupert's feared royalist cavalry matched their counterparts man for man and horse for horse, possessing around 4,000 on both the left and right under the command of Lord John Byron and George Goring respectively. Each of these divisions was also accompanied by musketeer units. However, the cavalry army only had 10,000 to 11,000 infantry soldiers in the center. It was drafted in the Swedish style that Rupert had witnessed first-hand during his service on the continent, and was led by the Earl of Newcastle, Prince Rupert himself, and several brigade commanders.

After a wait of several hours, the battle finally began around 7:30 p.m. m. with an artillery duel on the western side of the field. The Parliamentary cannons began firing at Byron's cavalry, causing heavy casualties15 and prompting a response from some Royalist cannons that had been placed on a raised area directly opposite. This bombardment caused some chaos in Cromwell's own ranks and the death of his own nephew. The round-headed commander remained calm and responded by ordering his troops to advance with two infantry regiments as backup. Prince Rupert's and Lord Byron's infantry regiments marched to meet them and a brief firefight ensued, severely maiming the Royalist units and forcing them to retreat.

This triumph heralded a “running march” of Parliamentary infantry up the hillside, as thunder began to crack and lightning flashed from above. In the center, Lord Fairfax's and Crawford's brigades made good progress, managing to overcome the defensive ditch and even capturing four Royalist "drake" class guns. However, not everything was going in the Parliamentarians' favor, as the Scottish infantry under Baillie had more difficulty breaking through the enemy ranks, bogged down by the cavalry action taking place alongside them. On the east wing of the battlefield, Sir Thomas Fairfax opened the fight by charging 400 mounted vanguards under his personal command against a Royalist cavalry unit of similar size in front of him.

The result was a rapid defeat of the York-bound horsemen, followed by Fairfax and his horse. However, this left most of the Parliamentarian forces without an overall commander and they quickly became bogged down during the advance. The uneven terrain, bracken, hedgerows and constant volleys of musketry16 caused disorder among the leaderless horsemen, and at the moment when they were at their most vulnerable, Lord Goring's troops launched a thunderous charge, driving them from the field of battle. As at Edgehill two years earlier, most of the Royalist horsemen broke ranks to pursue their defeated enemy, felling many fleeing soldiers and looting the Allied baggage train beyond the ridge.

Although they had won their confrontation, Göring's cavalry had also abandoned the battle. As Goring drove the Parliamentary cavalry on the right from the field, Oliver Cromwell rode at the head of his first line of Ironsides and charged headlong into Lord Byron's royalist horse in front, who counterattacked across the moor to meet them. . Both groups of horsemen fired their carbines until they were exhausted before turning around and drawing their sabers for a second charge. In this messy initial clash, it was Cromwell's horse that came off the best, causing some casualties and slowly driving Byron back. The situation became even more serious when Colonel Vermuyden's second line advanced to join his commander, and for a few moments it seemed that the royalists were going to give way.

However, they did not buckle under the pressure, allowing time for their own second line to join the fray and stabilize what was quickly becoming the largest cavalry engagement of the war. At some point during the chaotic melee, Oliver Cromwell suffered a cut to the neck, but he continued fighting among his men anyway. Witnessing the seemingly decisive engagement taking place near Tockwith, Prince Rupert gathered his army's cavalry reserve in addition to his personal lifeguard, and also fed those units for the engagement. His hope was to tip the balance in favor of Charles's forces by attacking Cromwell's unit on the front and sides.

When almost all the guns had been fired and the cavalry battle had become a sword-on-sword fight, the Parliamentary reserve of 1,000 Scottish soldiers under David Leslie advanced and attacked both Rupert's exposed flanks. Attacked from the front by Cromwell and from the sides by his Scottish allies, the Royalist front line was shattered and broken with heavy losses. Witnessing the massacre that followed, his comrades in the rear scattered and fled, with Rupert himself shamefully trapped in defeat. Unlike Goring's men across the field, Oliver Cromwell and his capable officers maintained complete control of their own highly disciplined mounted troops. They immediately stopped the chase before it began, began to regroup and assess the strategic situation.

In the center, Lord Fairfax's initially victorious infantry brigade was counterattacked by Newcastle. Although this was not in itself critical, the impact of Newcastle's advance also caused the first and second line Scottish infantry to withdraw, opening a gap in the Parliamentary line. Led by Sir William Blakiston, another small reserve of Royalist cavalry nearby seized the opportunity and charged into the gulf the Scots had left, cutting through the Allies' underbelly and even breaking their final line. However, indiscipline once again proved fatal and Blakiston's men also left the field to plunder theenemy baggage. The only section of Goring's cavalry that remained on the field attacked the infantry units on the centre-right of Parliament, causing significant damage and even frightening Leven, Lord Fairfax and Manchester into fleeing the field.

The infantry of the combined army was now in almost total disarray. Sir Thomas Fairfax returned to the field with a few hundred horses at this time. As he rode up to Cromwell's position, he supposedly asked, "Major General, what should I do?" In response, Fairfax said, "Sir, if you collect, all is not lost." Cromwell's cavalry surrounded the rear of the Royalist line, dispersed the cavalry that Goring had hastily returned, and then turned on the cavalry infantry. This marked the end of the battle. Hundreds of fleeing royalists were killed and only the so-called "lambs" of Newcastle, elite troops dressed in white woolen uniforms, refused to flee and were killed by a man.

After a battle that lasted several hours, 4,000 men of the king's army lay scattered across the bloody battlefield of Marston Moor, at the cost of only about 300 Parliamentarians. After being defeated by Cromwell and the Scots, Prince Rupert retreated in shame with his surviving cavalry. He would obsessively carry the king's ambiguous order with him for the rest of his life, ready to excuse his defeat if he was defied. The great Earl of Newcastle, whose talent initially secured the north of England for the royalists, could not endure the embarrassment. He completely abandoned Charles' cause, fleeing first to Scarborough and then across the sea to self-imposed exile in Hamburg.

With this disaster, the parliamentarians gained full control of the north. While Rupert's campaign began at Marston Moor in the north of England, equally important maneuvers were taking place in the south. The last time we saw Charles he was escaping from Oxford to Worcester, pursued by the Parliamentarian armies of William Waller and the Earl of Essex. In a move that has since been considered a strategic error, parliament's Both Kingdoms Committee ordered the armies of the Thames to be divided. Essex set out to relieve the Royalist siege of Lyme, while Waller's heavy cavalry force continued to pursue the king with diminished forces.

Unfortunately for the latter, Charles took the opportunity to return to the offensive, luring Waller into a trap and defeating him at Cropredy Bridge on 29 June. Even worse were the events that took place in the far southwest. After parting ways with Waller, Essex relieved Lyme and then even briefly managed to lift the long siege of Plymouth2. In the process, however, Essex's reckless western march towards a firmly royalist Cornwall left his forces trapped between Charles's reinforced army and the sea. Cut off from aid, Essex marched south towards Lostiwthiel, where he could establish contact with the Parliamentary fleet under the Earl of Warwick from the port of Fowey.

The Parliamentarian army deployed for battle around Lostwithiel, and Essex sent a detachment of infantry to hold Fowey Town and await the arrival of Warwick's fleet. Essex then placed the rest of his infantry regiments on the east side of the River Fowey, mainly around the high ground of Beacon Hill, and at Restormel Castle on the west side of the river further north. Parliamentary horse squadrons covered the army's flanks while patrolling the areas between the two main infantry detachments. On 11 August, the Royalist commander Sir Richard Grenville occupied Bodmin before moving south to seize Respryn Bridge, allowing him to establish immediate contact with the king's army on the east bank.

Grenville then moved on to Lanhydrock. Two days later, Lord Goring and Sir Jacob Astley advanced south along the east bank towards the coast and occupied Polruan Fort the next morning with 200 feet and some cannon. By taking the fort, they effectively closed any sea access to the Fowey Estuary for Warwick's fleet, leaving detachments to protect Bodinnick Ferry and the terrain off Golant. Essex hoped for the support of his former parliamentary rival, Sir William Waller. Waller had sent General Sir John Middleton with a contingent of horse and dragoon regiments from his own army to reinforce Essex, but at Bridgwater, they were repulsed by the Royalists under Sir Francis Doddington.

After his defeat at Cropredy Bridge, the rest of Waller's army could not be relied upon to provide any support to Essex. Establishing his headquarters at Boconnoc, just northeast of Lostwithiel, on 17 August, Charles rode along the causeway along the east bank of the river at Bodinnick Ferry, where he scouted the Parliamentary positions on the opposite side. The parliamentary guns opened fire but caused little damage to the king's entourage. On 21 August, Charles's army launched its attack on the Parliamentary positions on Beacon Hill. In the morning fog, the attack began at 7:00 a.m. Sir Richard Grenville's force advanced on the west bank against the Parliamentarian position at Restormel Castle, but Colonel John Weare's Devonshire Infantry Regiment hastily abandoned the castle to the Royalists.

Back on the east bank, the Royalists attacked Beacon and Druid Hills, taking both positions by assault. Advancing with a column across the Liskeard Road, Prince Maurice's forces captured the prominent hill on the other side. By the end of the day, the royalists were firmly established on the slopes overlooking Lostwithiel. That night, the royalists built a redoubt on Beacon Hill, raised their cannons, and began firing at the city from the earthworks. Over the next few days, the Parliamentarians did very little in response to the Royalist threat across the river. This led royalists to believe that Essex had in fact retreated towards Fowey Town.

With this assumption in mind, Charles sent half of his mounted force across Respryn Bridge to establish contact and support Grenville's advance on Lostwithiel along the western bank of the river. On 26 August, Lord Goring's 2,000 horses and Sir Thomas Bassett's infantry command marched southwest towards St. Blazey to cut off Essex's escape route and prevent supplies from reaching the Roundheads via the coast. Royalist detachments took St. Austell and the coastal village of Par, just four miles from Fowey Town. Essex's army was now effectively trapped within the strip of land between Lostwithiel, along the river, to Fowey, a front only two miles long and wide.

Meanwhile, a large Royalist supply train arrived at Charles from Dartmouth and replenished his ammunition reserves with 1,000 barrels of gunpowder. By contrast, Essex's army was hungry and short of ammunition, clinging desperately to its position at Lostwithiel. Persistent westerly winds had prevented Warwick's fleet from sailing into the estuary. The Essex army was running out of time and the general knew it. Using information obtained from Parliamentary deserters, on 30 August Grenville informed the king that Essex was planning a breakout to the east with his cavalry while his infantry and his cannon, with a small cavalry escort, withdrew. to Fowey Town.

The king immediately went into action and gave orders to his regiments to attack any Parliamentary troops that attempted to escape the encirclement. They fortified a hut on the Lostwithiel-Liskeard road and garrisoned it with fifty royalist musketeers to stop any Parliamentary cavalry advancing along the road to the east. Elsewhere, royalist horse squads tore down the bridge over the River Tamar. At three in the morning on 31 August, Sir William Balfour led the majority of his Parliamentary cavalry (around 2,000 soldiers) in a breakout from Lostwithiel. The musketeers in the hut did not fire a single shot. Balfour's horsemen galloped across the River Fowey Bridge and set off towards Liskeard.

At the end of the day, Balfour managed to cross the Tamar by ferry and reach Plymouth with his command largely intact. The Earl of Cleveland soon set out in pursuit of him the next morning with his brigade of 500 men, but was unable to catch the Parliamentary soldiers. On 2 September, Parliamentary infantry and guns marched from Lostwithiel southwards, beginning their part of the breakout. Major General Philip Skippon led the Parliamentary rearguard, whose colors King Charles could see from the top of Beacon Hill. The king ordered his army to advance and capture the Roundheads. At 7:00 a.m. m., 1,000 musketeers crossed the bridge over the River Fowey towards Lostwithiel, preventing a Parliamentary demolition party from destroying the town and driving out the remaining Roundheads.

The royalists trained their guns across Lostwithiel and opened fire on the Roundheads' rearguard. Under pressure from heavy cannon fire and Royalist foot attacks, Skippon's troops fell back. As the main body of the Royalist army fell on the Parliamentarian rearguard south of Lostwithiel, King Charles led his lifeboat regiment from Beacon Hill to the river and forded the western bank south of the town. Here he encountered Grenville's Cornish force leading the Royalist advance. Lieutenant-Colonel William Leighton of the King's Life Guards Regiment of Foot gathered the Royalist infantry regiments and led them into the fields west of Trebathevy Farm.

Simultaneously, Charles launched his own mounted lifebuoy in a counterattack, forcing the Parliamentarian foot back across several fields and hedgerows. At approximately 2:00 p.m., the Royalist infantry managed to catch up with their cavalry counterparts, and the rest of the day was spent fighting smaller, faster skirmishes. Sir Thomas Basset, from St. Blazey, attacked the Parliamentarian left flank, while Colonel Appleyard led the vanguard of the main Royalist army in its assault from Lostwithiel, driving back the Parliamentarian infantry regiments towards Fowey Town. At 4:00 p.m. m., Essex launched the remaining mounted squadrons with the support of his own infantry regiment in a desperate counterattack, managing to drive back the royalists and capture two of his banners in the action.

But the King's Lifeboat soon arrived and crashed into the Roundheads, forcing them to retreat once more. Lord Goring then arrived with his horse retinue from St. Blazey and was ordered to continue across the battlefield and join the pursuit of Balfour's parliamentary horse squadrons to the east. Skippon launched a last-ditch effort to stop the Royalist pursuit in the early afternoon with a counterattack from Castle Dore. For another hour the Royalists were forced back across two fields, but then rallied and drove the Parliamentarians back to Castle Dore. The Earl of Northampton's Cavalry Brigade arrived and joined the assault, but darkness put an end to the chase and battle.

Essex himself had to flee in a small fishing boat and, although his cavalry managed to escape, 6,000 footmen were forced to surrender at Lostwithiel. Alarmed by the sudden changes of fortune so close to London, Parliament ordered Waller and the Eastern Association Army under Manchester to reinforce the west. When the king subsequently attempted to raise a Parliamentary siege of Basing House in late October, he was blocked and forced to fight at the Second Battle of Newbury against an army twice his size. Charles refused to retreat and avoid a pitched battle with the approaching Parliamentary army. The Royalist army was formed in battle array north of Newbury, with its right flank resting on the River Kennet, its center reinforced by the fortified position of Shaw House, and its left anchored by Donnington Castle.

On October 26, the parliamentary army began contacts with the royalists, investigating their lines in the context of small-scale skirmishes. At Clay Hill, the Parliamentary guns opened an intense bombardment against the Royalists at Shaw House. Meanwhile, the senior parliamentary generals met in a war council. Probably at Waller's urging, the Parliamentarians adopted a plan of attack in which his army would carry out a circuitous march northwards around the Royalist lines and then assault their far left flank through Speen Village. A simultaneous attack would be launched against the eastern end of the Royalist line at Shaw House. The flanking columns would have to march a distance of thirteen miles, passing through villages and across the Lambourn before turning east across Wickham Heath to Speen.

Instructions were given that a cannon shot would signal the beginning of the attack by the flank force, while Manchester began its own assault on Shaw House. Gathering information about the Roundheads' intentions, the king moved Prince Maurice's Cornish infantry regiments and horse squadrons to Speen, where they set to work building a sturdy armed redoubt.with several cannons. Three brigades of foot occupied the ground around Shaw Village, while Sir Humphrey Bennet's horse brigade held the center of the army with detachments further south at Newbury and the crossing points of the Lambourn at Bangor, and on the route of the enemy's flanking march at Boxford.

In the early morning hours of October 27, the parliamentary flanking force began its march. Before he could cross the Lambourn, he was discovered by royalists at Donnington Castle. The Royalist horse detachment at Boxford was driven off by the Roundheads late in the morning, and soon the Parliamentarians crossed Wickham Heath and approached Speen. Instead of waiting for the signal from Waller's cannon, Manchester opened his attack on the royalists at Shaw House and Shaw Village. Although they were initially successful in their attacks, the Parliamentarians under the slow Manchester movement were driven back in disorder and confusion. Waller's flanking columns reached their attack positions at 3:00 p.m., but came under heavy artillery bombardment from Prince Maurice's redoubt and from the four guns at Donnington Castle.

Eight hundred musketeers from the Army of Essex, supported by a brigade of horse, assaulted the redoubt while the remaining Parliamentary forces stormed Speen Village, clashing with Maurice's Cornish infantry inside the town. Within an hour the redoubt and Speen Village had fallen into Parliamentary hands, forcing Maurice's regiments to retreat in confused retreat. Following success, Balfour led his horse squadrons in pursuit of Maurice's Cornish men, but found himself crashing into a reserve line outside Speen commanded personally by the king. Thanks to the efforts of the King's Royal Guard, Balfour's soldiers prevented Charles from being captured. As the daylight hours faded into night, Cromwell brought in a retinue of reserve cavalry, but apparently failed to seize the initiative and quickly attack the collapsing Royalist line.

Lord Goring's horse charged Cromwell's own cavalry and, before long, Cromwell was driven back. Meanwhile, Balfour's horse was attacked by companies of musketeers posted in the ditches and around the hedges outside Speen. Balfour's soldiers were quickly counter-attacked and driven back by a mustered brigade of Royalist horsemen under Sir Humphrey Bennet. Back on the Royalist right flank, Manchester began its second assault at around 4:30, as daylight was rapidly fading. He sent two columns from Clay Hill, the right column faced Shaw House while the larger column on the left moved to Shaw Village. However, both attacks were stopped by stubborn royalist resistance and repulsed with serious losses.

Before the Parliamentary advance could continue on either end of the battlefield, darkness fell on the besieged troops, quickly ending the engagement. Against all odds and despite the king's near capture, Charles's army managed to retreat unhindered, partly due to Manchester's reluctance to continue the attack. The final campaigns of the King's Year were similarly successful. Manchester once again failed to decisively attack the royalists on 9 November at Speenhamland and a week later he was unable to prevent Charles from relieving Banbury. On the 23rd, relative optimism pervaded the king's camp as the soldiers headed into winter quarters. Parliament's failure to successfully end the war in late 1644 sparked recriminations and blame among the increasingly fractured group of Parliamentarians during the winter of 44/45.

More importantly, it led radicals like Oliver Cromwell and William Waller to begin speaking out in favor of establishing an entirely different military style. It would be, as Trevor Royle put it: “a professional and disciplined regular force, well paid and well equipped, under the control of an independent commander-in-chief.” In short, it would be a standing army composed of dedicated experts, detached from the politicking of parliament and whose sole objective would be to obtain victory over the king. After weeks of research and debate, this 'New Model Army' finally emerged on 11 January 1645, when the Commons passed the New Model Ordinance and began raising 12 regiments of 1,200 infantry each, 10 cavalry regiments , each with 600 soldiers. and a regiment of 1,000 dragoons.

Ten days later, supreme command of the New Model Army was awarded to Sir Thomas Fairfax, due to a combination of extensive military experience, and because although he was unquestionably loyal to the parliamentary cause, he was not a member of Parliament3. Thereafter, Members of Parliament were largely prohibited from holding command, ending the military careers of the Earls of Manchester and Essex. Although the embryonic New Model Army would become immensely formidable over the course of months and years, it needed time to fill its ranks and become an effective fighting force. This necessity determined a measured Parliamentary offensive strategy in the early months of 1645, and also made the continued cooperation of Leven's Scots very valuable.

However, the Covenanters were becoming cautious about giving too much aid to their English "allies." This was partly because the Scots feared that radicals like Cromwell would breach the Solemn League, and partly because in Charles's northern kingdom royalist allies were causing total chaos... In September 1643, the factions At war in Ireland they signed a peace that freed the English royalist soldiers to be sent to help the king. The agreement also allowed the Irish Confederates, whose alliances were constantly shifting, to renew their war against the Scots and Presbyterian Parliamentarians. Therefore, in late June 1644, 2,000 Irish mercenaries recruited by the royalist Earl of Antrim sailed for Ardnamurchan in Scotland under the command of the Scot Alasdair MacColla.

Upon landing, MacColla immediately began gathering highland chiefs who were bitterly hostile to the Covenanter Campbell clan, such as the leaders of the Macphersons and MacDonalds, for war. Meanwhile, in Oxford, James Graham, also known as the Marquis of Montrose, had defected from the Covenanters before the civil war began. Faced with the threat of pro-Parliamentary intervention by his compatriot, Charles appointed Montrose his lord lieutenant in Scotland and sent him north with only two loyal companions. When Montrose arrived, he joined MacColla at Blair Atholl and the two immediately made common cause. This was convenient for both because, as Stuart Reid notes, "Montrose needed an army and MacColla desperately needed an employer." This motley army of unlikely Celtic allies and even more unlikely royalists moved south to Perth.

Outside the city, on the plains of Tippermuir, Montrose and MacColla defeated a Covenanter army of roughly the same size as their own, whose infantry was composed mainly of raw recruits. Soon, they learned that a larger Covenanter force was gathering in Stirling. Trying to get away from him and gather local allies, Montrose marched north, bypassing Dundee on the way to Aberdeen, where another enemy army awaited him. Despite facing an army that outnumbered his own and had taken a strong position, Montrose and his Irish colleague again crushed the Covenanter loyalists, inflicting 520 casualties and suffering only minimal losses. Due to the death of his favorite drummer, who was shot in cold blood during pre-battle negotiations, Montrose let his troops brutally sack Aberdeen for four days on September 13, 1644.

This event, fueled by blood feuds that generations and sectarian conflicts lasted. hate, it would be known as Black Friday. In October 1644, Montrose campaigned throughout Aberdeenshire against his Covenanter rival, the Earl of Argyll, and faced his numerically superior forces at the Battle of Fyvie, where neither side was able to gain the advantage. When winter came, Argyll returned to Strathbogie and Montrose marched back over the hills to Blair Atholl. Far more consequential than simply defeating a few small Scottish armies, Montrose's actions were beginning to affect the broader strategic situation of the war. The Covenanter government, increasingly concerned about Royalist success in their backyard, ordered Leven to detach 9 regiments of his own army, led by Marston Moor veteran William Baillie, to stop Montrose.

Argyll and Baillie managed to join forces, but constant disagreements led to the two men parting ways soon after. Montrose, unwilling to give his rivals a moment to relax, set out on a dangerous march and attacked Argyll's 3,000-man army with 1,500 of his own at Inverlochy on 2 February. Once again, the Marquis won a complete victory against a far superior force. These events ensured that the Covenanter priorities were diverted from winning the war in England and diverted the attention of Leven's army from the brewing campaign in 1645. Instead, they remained in the Scottish Marches to prevent Montrose from receiving reinforcements from Carlos.

The parliamentarians were alone. With the Royalists lacking any real strategic direction and Parliament waiting for its new army to sharpen its claws, the campaign in the south began in a disjointed manner. In the west, a group of the king's commanders attempted to secure the Welsh marches and relieve pressure on Chester. In the far south, Lord Goring ravaged Hampshire before retreating to Salisbury at the end of January. Hundreds of miles to the north, Marmaduke Langdale's northern horse managed to relieve Pontefract in early March and was back in the Royalist stronghold of Newark by 4 March. The Committee of Both Kingdoms fired the opening shot in the parliamentary campaign of 1645 by ordering Cromwell, who had returned from training with Goring's forces in the west of the country, just east of Oxford, on 21 April.

Meanwhile, Fairfax led the bulk of the New Model Army from Windsor to Reading, where he and his 10,000 men were resupplied. As Fairfax, now fully supplied, prepared to march west to save Taunton from siege,4 Cromwell repeatedly harassed Charles' forces near his capital, brazenly seizing all the draft horses that would be needed to transport artillery and preventing for the royal army to leave. However, when Göring and his 4,000 returning cavalry met Cromwell at Radcot Bridge on 3 May, the Parliamentary horse retreated south5 into friendly territory. With the troublesome Parliamentary cavalry commander out of the way, Charles marched from Oxford to Stow-on-the-Wold with his troops, where he consulted with prominent royalist leaders, including Goring, Rupert and others.

Once again the war council argued over the correct course to take, and finally came to the conclusion that Göring and 3,000 horse would split to the west and bring Taunton into Royalist hands, while the main Royalist army would head towards the North. In reaction to the enemy's movement, the Committee changed its mind about the objectives of the New Model Army and sent new orders to its leader. Reluctantly obeying, Fairfax sent four regiments to Taunton and returned most of his soldiers with the aim of an eventual meeting with Cromwell. The latter followed Charles's army from afar as it marched towards Chester, but he was unable to prevent the royalists from lifting the siege there6.

Parliament sent messages asking for aid to Leven, but Montrose's continued success in Scotland left the Covenanters unable and unwilling to divert resources south. Partly because the Committee believed that Oxford would surrender without a fight due to bad information, Fairfax was ordered to lay siege to the city beginning on 21 May, news which reached the Royalists only a few days later. In response, Charles's field army unexpectedly turned and began marching southeast towards Leicester, an important Parliamentary garrison which he arrived just over a week later. With the aim of distracting the New Model Army that was besieging their capital, increasingly deprived of food, the royalists attacked.

A savage two-day standoff over the city's defenses and a "violent storm" of cannon fire ensued, after which the Leicester garrison was overwhelmed and the city raided and plundered. However, 400 royalist soldiers were killed and many more wounded, severely depleting the king's forces. Seeing the danger of continuing the fight and having obtained much loot, the soldiers began to abandon Carlos's house and return home. His remaining army remained in and around Leicester until 4 June, when it moved to Daventry. Meanwhile, the fall of such an important Midlands garrison caused the Committee to order Fairfax to lift the siege of Oxford and take Charles into battle.

HeJune 9, 1645, Parliament made two key decisions. First, Fairfax was given “strategic independence” from the Committee. Secondly, Oliver Cromwell, the rising star of parliament, was confirmed in assigning him to the hitherto vacant post of Lieutenant General of Cavalry in the New Model Army. Realizing that a fight might be on the horizon, Prince Rupert ordered an increasingly lethargic Lord Goring to return from the west of the county. However, Goring's reply letter, which reiterated his temporary inability to return and pleaded with the king not to fight until he did, was intercepted by the New Model Army. This intelligence coup had two consequences.

He alerted Fairfax that he did not have to worry about Goring reinforcing the king, while also depriving him of any knowledge that he was not going to be reinforced. Now confident in their possibilities, Fairfax and Cromwell approached the Royalist position, which the New Model Army's efficient scouts reported was nearby. The royalists attempted to retreat northwards to recruit more troops, but as they did so, their rear was constantly harassed by attacks from Parliamentarian cavalry. Near the Northamptonshire town of Naseby, it became clear that a key decision had to be made: Prince Rupert, unusually, ordered a further retreat and avoid battle, but his advice was not heeded.

The king would stand up and fight. At this point it is worth examining the armies that faced each other on that historic day in the summer of 1645. Deprived of their manpower base in the north, the Royalist force deployed on Dust Hill, near Naseby, was greatly diminished by comparison. with whom he had fought at Marston Moor the previous year. . Its main infantry brigades in the first and second lines numbered 3,500 veteran soldiers, including 2,925 musketeers and 575 pikemen. To the center left were Sir George Lisle's regiments and to his right were arrayed units under the command of Henry Bard, as well as the Queen's personal lifeguard.

In the right center were regiments under the command of Sir Edward Hopton on the inside and the Duke of York on the outside. Three more infantry regiments were formed in the second line, while Prince Rupert, King Charles and a mixed reserve remained in the rear, consisting of the king's personal lifeguards, horse and foot, plus the "bluecoats" of Prince Rupert. Interspersed between the infantry ranks were three small cavalry divisions: two behind the vanguard and one more behind the second line. On the Royalist left flank were approximately 1,700 horse in three divisions, including Marmaduke Langdale's northern troops. They were formed in the Swedish style, with 200 musketeers lined up between each unit.

Charles's other wing, anchored on a series of hedges, reflected the strength of his counterpart and was under the authority of Prince Maurice. This cavalry gathering was composed of Rupert's elite lifeguard units and divisions, revered units that had served with distinction since Edgehill. Musketeers also accompanied them. In total, the royalist army at Naseby numbered between 10,000 and 10,500 soldiers, just over half of them mounted troops. After some direction from Cromwell, the numerically superior New Model Army took up a position on Closter Hill, the opposite location, and the red and blue uniforms of its soldiers made them stand out against the green landscape.

Their pike and musketeer infantry in the center probably numbered about 8,500 in three battle lines: five regiments in the first, three manned in the second, and half a regiment in the third. The foot was led at a tactical level by Philip Skippon, one of Parliament's most senior infantry commanders, while Lord General Sir Thomas Fairfax was with him in reserve, overseeing the battle from a strategic distance. On the wings, Horse Lieutenant-General Cromwell commanded 4,000 mounted troops on the right, including the now infamous Ironsides. On the other wing was Henry Ireton, Cromwell's son-in-law, who opposed Maurice with some 2,500 members of the parliamentary left.

At around 9:30 on the morning of June 14, Cromwell surveyed the situation from his 8th elevated position on Mill Hill. He was determined to exploit a potential opportunity in an element that anchored the western side of the parliamentary formation: the Sulby hedges. The lieutenant-general rode briskly to the rear and arrived, half a mile later, in the presence of a contingent of dragoons under Colonel John Okey. Following direct instructions from Cromwell, the colonel's dragoons mounted their horses, advanced beyond the hedge and ascended the slope beyond. After riding west of the bushes for a short time, completely visible to the Royalist army, the dragoons approached the cavalry on Maurice's right side.

There, they encountered volley after volley of musketry from units that had prepared in advance for their arrival, and were forced to retreat down a small slope to cover. From their now superior position, Okey's dragoons unleashed withering fire on the royal cavalry from beyond the Sulby hedge, disordering their formation and causing significant losses... Upon receiving reports of a developing situation on the right wing that required attention, Prince Rupert moved from his position behind the royalist foot to assess the situation. Upon arrival, it was immediately clear that Maurice's horse could not withstand such harassment in its current position, so they were ordered to advance immediately.

After moving out of range, the Royalist cavalry took a moment to stop and regroup before launching a thunderous charge. In front of them, Henry Ireton's horse returned the gesture, galloping up Sulby Hill and meeting his enemy at the base of it in a fierce clash. In the interior, closer to the infantry, Vermuyden and Ireton's units were incredibly effective, defeating three cavalry divisions in front of them and then moving to turn towards the Royalist center. This turned out to be a mistake. Rupert's units outside decisively swept the Parliamentary horse arrayed against them off the field and then turned to crash into the now distracted Ireton.

The latter's forces completely collapsed when attacked from the rear and were routed from the field, chased towards the artillery train by the victorious units under Rupert. Once again, the Prince had failed to press his advantage. At this point, around 11 a.m., Charles's infantry vanguard began a forward march with its right side slightly tilted ahead of the rest. Unfortunately for the New Model Army, both their muskets and heavy weapons fired too high, barely causing any damage to the advancing veterans. Upon making contact, they broke through the first center line of round feet in brutal hand-to-hand combat9, in which muskets were commonly used as clubs.

All of this fighting resulted in the creation of a deep semicircular salient around the victorious infantry brigades. Despite its initial success, the king's center had yet to make a decisive advance and was now attacked by new Parliamentary reserves from the front and flanks of the arch. As the clash of pikes and muskets continued, Sir Marmaduke Langdale's north horse on the eastern edge of Dust Hill launched its own charge. Cromwell's front rank of cavalry mirrored his movements and prepared for engagement. The sturdy Parliamentarian horse almost immediately slowed the progress of Langdale's attack, but still the Royalists fought tenaciously, gradually driving Cromwell's front line back through the rough, narrow terrain made up of rabbit warrens and small hills.

However, the northern cavalry was incredibly fatigued at this point, exhausted by the intense fighting against the Ironsides. Although the king sent his reserve lifeguard into the fray, they had no chance of resisting when Cromwell called up his second line and they were sent to the rear, where they took shelter near Rupert's "blue coat" regiment, which was not there. engaged. After defeating the royalists who stood in his way, Oliver Cromwell ordered the immediate halt of all his troops on the right wing, displaying phenomenal authority in maintaining order and discipline where lesser leaders would have faltered. The lieutenant general took a few minutes to get his troops back into proper formation, during which he was joined by Fairfax and the rest of Ireton's horse,10 before embarking on a final cavalry charge towards the left flank of the now Carlos's fighting infantry11.

Pinned down as they were in front and on the sides, the fighting Royalist foot had no chance of resisting Cromwell's attack. As the king's army began to disintegrate, Fairfax, who was now at the front, noticed that Prince Rupert's Bluecoats were still intact and refused to flee. The commander of the New Model Army led his personal guard around the Bluecoats' rear, while another parliamentary infantry regiment attacked them from the front. Rupert's guard did not back down and died before a man. In the midst of the slaughter, it is said that one of the Parliamentary soldiers managed to seize the colors of the Bluecoat regiment and boasted about it.

When an officer reprimanded him for doing so, Fairfax personally intervened, saying, "I have enough honor, let him take it upon himself." Naseby finally shattered the Royalist war machine. At the cost of only a few hundred casualties, Fairfax's New Model Army had killed around a thousand Royalist soldiers, wounded many more, and captured some 5,000 infantry, most of whom were the core of battle-hardened veterans of Carlos. Rather than pursue further his shattered enemy, Fairfax immediately set about recovering Leicester, which was taken on 18 June. After his crushing defeat at the hands of the Parliamentarians in Northamptonshire, the Royalist cause in England began to go into complete free fall.

Although the king realized that his prospects were bleak, he still had a few thousand good cavalry with whom he quickly traveled to the Welsh border, where there was a vague hope of reinforcements. Back in the Midlands and newly recovered from Leicester on 18 June, Fairfax did not bother pursuing Charles and instead marched towards Taunton. There, the last fully formed royalist field army, about 9,000 strong and under the command of Goring, besieged the city. Upon receiving word that he was about to be attacked by the superior New Model Army, Goring lifted the siege and attempted to retreat towards Bridgewater.

Unfortunately for this fiery king, Fairfax was too quick and confronted him at Langport on 10 July, destroying the last Royalist field force. If the destruction of Goring's army and Parliament's subsequent occupation of the western country were not bad enough, Fairfax then marched north to capture Bristol, the king's last great manufacturing center and main gateway to Ireland. After Naseby, Charles valued the city's security so much that the illustrious Prince Rupert, demoralized but still fiercely loyal, was appointed governor and ordered to hold it against the enemy at all costs1. So confident was he that assurances were given to the king that Bristol could hold out at least until Christmas.

However, not even the man who was possibly Charles's main commander could resist Fairfax's impulse. After a miserable siege of just 18 days, a desperate Rupert surrendered Bristol on 10 September in exchange for clemency and an escort back to Oxford. When the king heard of the prince's abandonment of Bristol, he was completely distraught. In response, a royal letter of condemnation was drafted containing, among other things: "What should be done after someone who is so close to me in both blood and friendship is subjected to such cruel action, the bad news for realists?" He just kept coming. Only three days after the 'Bristol Betrayal', as it was dubbed by conspiring royalist courtiers, news reached Oxford that the Marquis of Montrose, Charles's singular ray of hope in Scotland, had been defeated at Philiphaugh with the loss of his entire army2.

Although the marquis continued to cause trouble, there would be no salvation from the north. Increasingly deprived of options, the king marched north in an attempt to relieve Chester, the hypothetical landing point for any Irish Confederate soldiers who might come to his aid. He arrived on the 23rd, but was quickly outmatched in battle and forced to retreat to Oxford via Newark. The following months were a long litany of bitter disappointment and failure among royalist supporters. Although there were no major battles, the garrisons fell one by one until, by early 1646, Parliament controlled most of the country. Fearing for the safety of his son and heir, Charles sent the Prince of Wales to France around this time.

The final act of the First Civil War took place at Stow-on-the-Wold on21 March, when New Model units under Richard Brereton intercepted and defeated a 3,000-strong Royalist contingent returning south to reinforce the skeleton garrison at Oxford. Some of the cavalry managed to escape the trap and reach Charles's position, but the army commander, Lord Astley, and most of his Welsh levies capitulated without much resistance. As he was led off the field, Astley turned to his men and said, "You've done your job, boys, and you can go play, unless you get into a fight among yourselves." With enemy armies approaching Oxford, Charles left the city with only two companions and headed north.

For months, covert negotiations under French supervision4 had been going on between the king and the Covenanters, who were deeply dissatisfied with their treatment by the parliament. Having received promises that he would be treated honorably and not be forced to do anything that would "disturb his conscience", Charles entered Leven Camp at Newark on 5 May and was taken prisoner. The king now had protection in custody, while the Scots had an invaluable piece on the chess board. Eager to keep him safe, they returned to Newcastle on the 13th. Around the same time, tension between the king's jailers and the English parliament was reaching fever pitch.

On 12 August, the Committee of Scottish Commissioners of Both Kingdoms informed their counterparts that, although the war had been won, they were only willing to withdraw their army from the north of England if the £1.8 million being paid was paid. he owed them as compensation. The quickly splintering factions managed to reach a financial settlement, but it was clear that even beyond this, the Covenanters were furious at Parliament's disregard for the Solemn League and the Covenant. What made the Scots' war aims even less plausible was the fact that they failed to convert the captive king to Presbyterianism, or at least did not agree to impose it on his kingdom as Parliament had earlier promised.

The king's utter obstinacy and his repeated plots to escape eventually caused the Scots to believe he was not worth it. On January 28, 1647, they agreed to sell Charles to the English parliament in exchange for outstanding payments totaling £400,000. Once this was done, the Scottish army began to withdraw into its own country and demobilize after almost half a decade of war. Meanwhile, the king was transferred to house arrest in Holdenby, and along the way he repeatedly encountered cheering crowds. In London, Parliament was not the strong and relatively united faction that had managed to win the civil war. Instead, without Charles as a strong enemy to unite against, the gap between the moderate "presbyterians" and the more radical "independents" widened dangerously.

In late February and early March, members of the Presbyterian faction, who generally sought accommodation with the king, were busy unilaterally gunning down the infantry regiments of the New Model Army, which were often led by independents. To make the cut even more serious, this would be done without paying outstanding salaries owed to the troops. The military had other motivations, including the politics advocated by a group of would-be egalitarians known as the Levellers. They believed that the army's anti-royalist triumph would herald a new era of equality and the elimination of wealth and privilege. Disputes within parliament continued for the next few months until the hitherto relatively neutral Oliver Cromwell, who was both a prominent parliamentarian and an equally prominent commander of the New Model Army, began to realize that his position was untenable.

Amid rumors of a Presbyterian plot to seize the king and use him for his own political purposes, Cromwell probably tolerated the sending of an "arch-agitator" known as George Joyce to Holdenby at the end of May, with the task of taking the king in his power. own custody. On the morning of June 3, Charles I left Holdenby House and set out for Newmarket accompanied by Joyce's troops. The politically neutral Sir Thomas Fairfax and his New Model Army were assembled there, and the army's mood was growing increasingly restless. In London, the revelation of Charles's military detention gave Cromwell the excuse he needed to cross his personal rubicon.

He abandoned parliament entirely and traveled north to personally lead the New Model Army, among whom he was incredibly popular. When Cromwell and Charles first met for talks, relations were quite cordial, contrary to what later events would imply. The parliamentary cavalry general even reported to a friend that the king was "the most upright and conscientious man in his three kingdoms." However, behind the scenes, Charles continued his clandestine communications with the Scots, aiming to keep all his options open. For the moment, Cromwell and the army had other problems that distracted them. In late July 1647, riots, sparked by the continued wartime tax rate, got out of control in the English capital.

The violence led several “independent” parliamentarians to flee under the protection of the army5, including the president of the chamber. Legitimized by the speaker's presence on his side, Fairfax and Cromwell led the New Model Army to London and placed it under military occupation. When the situation was deemed safe, the king was escorted from Newmarket and installed at Hampton Court, where the imprisoned monarch still stubbornly refused any agreement not entirely on his terms. Instead, Charles hoped that the obvious divisions between the various parliamentary factions could be widened and exploited for his own purposes. Initially, that political strategy seemed to be working well when, on 18 October, five leveling officers presented to the army's 'big boys', led by Lord General Fairfax, The Case for the Army Truly Stated.

It was a revolutionary manifesto that called for radical reforms that included, among others: the dissolution of parliament and the implementation of a new constitution that would give "all freeborn" the right to vote. To avoid disruption in the New Model Army, Fairfax opened the so-called Putney Debates to address the issue. Although Cromwell's rejection of such a constitutional change decided the issue, the anti-monarchical nature of the discussion reached the king and frightened him. Fearing for his safety, or simply fed up with being locked up, Charles escaped in late November and eventually ended up at Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, in an even less favorable imprisonment than before.

If this irritation was not enough to harden Cromwell's attitude towards the king, the harsher information he was receiving certainly was. Just after Christmas 1647, Charles I secretly signed an agreement with the Scots known as the "Compromise", a military alliance between the king and his northern kingdom in exchange for state-enforced Presbyterianism. After much debate in the Edinburgh assembly, the royalists who became known as the "Engagers" gained a majority and, on 20 April 1648, issued a declaration accusing the English parliament of breaking the Solemn League and Covenant. previously established. He also demanded religious uniformity and the complete dissolution of the New Model Army, which the Scots considered the most problematic piece on the chessboard.

This was completely impossible for the English and so, just a week later, the Engagers began mobilizing for war against their recently deposed ally. But this time, however, Parliament and its renegade army were already dealing with the embers of the Troubles in England. By the end of March, a spontaneous revolt in support of the king had broken out in Wales, led by Colonel John Poyer. However, it was put down in short order by Cromwell's rapid movement. Meanwhile, in the north of England, the efforts of revanchist royalist commander Marmaduke Langdale were limited due to the intervention of General John Lambert.

This was not the end of parliament's problems. At the end of May, an overly draconian parliamentary commissioner in Kent sparked an uprising which, while enjoying some initial success, was ultimately confined to the town of Colchester, which was besieged on 12 June. Although all of these revolts still posed a threat in their own right, everyone on Parliament's side knew that an invasion from Scotland was imminent. As one of Charles's allies stated: “It is Scotland, and only Scotland, that can save the King and England. All the others arise from Scotland's expectations.” The decisive campaign of the short Second Civil War was about to take place.

The Royalist storm finally broke on 8 July, when a approximately 10,000-strong Scottish army under the Duke of Hamilton crossed the border into northern England and joined Langdale's 4,000 besieged rebels at Carlisle. With the tables turned by the presence of this new enemy, Lambert obeyed Cromwell's orders to retreat to the safety of Barnard Castle after suffering some minor losses. This would allow the parliamentary army to be preserved while reinforcements headed north to deal with the problem6. Unfortunately for the royalists, Hamilton was forced to halt his offensive for two weeks while supplies and reinforcements arrived from Scotland and Ireland. This gave Cromwell time to reach the area and allowed the two Parliamentary generals to meet at Wetherby on 12 August, forming a veteran army numbering around 9,000 men.

Unwilling to allow the invaders any opportunity to advance further into the country, Cromwell sped west towards Lancashire and down the Ribble Valley to intercept his advance southwards along the western coast of England. England. To increase the pace of his army's march, Cromwell decided to leave the Parliamentary artillery behind. Having decided to advance further into Lancashire to link up with potential allies in Wales, the bulk of Hamilton's Scots halted at the top of Preston Moor at dusk on 16 August. They settled in for the night and prepared to cross the River Ribble in the morning, while the bulk of the Scottish cavalry was sent towards Wigan on a foraging mission.

Langdale's force of around 3,000 feet and 600 horse, functioning as a cavalry screen to the east of the main one, was joined about four miles northeast of Preston at Longridge. Due to inadequate reconnaissance, the king's supporters were completely unaware that Cromwell's 9,000 men were only a few miles away, camped at Stonyhurst Park. As the sun appeared on the horizon on August 17, Hamilton ordered Baillie to begin marching the Scottish foot across the river7. Shortly after this, a small vanguard of Cromwell's army began skirmishing with Langdale's surprised men on the road from Clitheroe. Believing that the entire Parliamentary force was in the area, the royalist general personally addressed Hamilton and informed him of the situation, but his officers convinced the latter to continue crossing the river.

With minimal reinforcements to assist him, Langdale returned to his beleaguered contingent. After hours of light skirmishing, he was finally attacked by Cromwell's entire army in mid-afternoon. The battlefield was a disconnected patchwork of small fields, crisscrossed by ditches, narrow lanes and high hedges in which the New Model infantry units had a clear advantage over the newly recruited rookies in the Royalist force. However, Langdale's musketeers gave a good account of themselves and initially managed to hold off Cromwell's army and avoid being outflanked. However, when the fighting south of Clitheroe Road was at its height, Lambert threw his Lancashire regiment into the sector and sent the Royalist screen towards Preston.

Accounts differ as to what happened next, but all agree that the situation quickly unraveled after Langdale's defeat. Hamilton was trapped at Preston trying to rally the latest arrivals among his cavalry from the north, while the small earthwork defense around Ribble Bridge was quickly taken after some New Model Army skirmishers captured an area of ​​high ground that allowed him dominated. Many Scots died before they could cross the bridge, but Hamilton managed to cross the river on horseback and joined most of his forces on the south bank. With Cromwell now blocking the way back to Scotland, the exhausted royalists could only continue south, where reinforcements would hopefully arrive.

For three days following the battle, the Scots, forced to abandon their ammunition, were constantly harassed by Cromwell's Ironsides until they reached Winwick. There, the Scottish infantry was attacked and decimated by the veteran Parliamentarian footmen. Although chivalry and leadershipThey managed to escape, what remained of Hamilton's infantry surrendered on August 20. At the other end of the country, an enraged Fairfax brought the rebels in famine and disease-stricken Colchester to the negotiating table on the 27th. He was in no merciful mood and had Sir George Lisle and Sir Charles Lucas, defiant royalists until the end, for causing such unnecessary suffering to the innocents of the kingdom.

Charles I was still imprisoned at Carisbrooke, but to the religious Parliamentary soldiers, his former king had unjustly returned the fight to the land of England even after God's will had resulted in his defeat during the first war. Therefore, Carlos was guilty of ignoring the will of the lord and deserved no mercy. For this crime against his own people, Charles was nicknamed the "Man of Blood" and many radicals began to call for severe punishment. A famous passage taken from Numbers 35:33 of the King James Bible began to resonate as an example. "Therefore you shall not defile the land on which you are: for blood defiles the land; and the land cannot be cleansed from the blood that is shed on it, except by the blood of him who shed it." Scotland's fragile alliance with the king completely exploded when news of Hamilton's defeat at Preston began to filter north.

Sensing blood in the water, anti-participation factions loyal to the “Kirk”, or “church”, attacked and plunged Scotland into its own civil war. In early September, Kirk's insurrectionists took Stirling and Edinburgh, but it became clear that they did not have the military advantage when the Engagers recaptured Stirling shortly afterwards. However, the threat of a Cromwellian intervention on their border forced an agreement that formalized the legitimacy of the anti-participants. With peace in Scotland assured, for now, a victorious Cromwell entered the country and dined with noble friends in Edinburgh1. Meanwhile, momentous events were taking place in England. The cruelty and futility of the Second Civil War had widened the gap between the moderates in parliament, who wanted an agreement with the king, and the “independent” radicals of the New Model Army, who now wanted him gone.

Charles's continued refusal to budge on religious issues during subsequent negotiations further angered the radicals during the latter part of 1648, and this led to a temporary alliance between the Extreme Levellers and the army grandees, led by Henry Ireton. The army officers' patience finally ran out on December 1 and they decided to act. Charles was forcibly returned to the continent and installed at Hurst Castle, while Fairfax and the main force occupied London the following day. Following Ireton's orders and without the Lord General's knowledge, Colonel Thomas Pride marched towards Parliament at dawn on the 6th and carried out what became known as "The Purge of Pride".

MPs who voted to compromise with the king were either barred from the Commons or arrested, leaving a docile Parliament of 156 members. From that moment on, the military was in control of the country and began to use its new authority to punish Charles I for his crimes. On the first day of 1649, Ireton's new puppet parliament decreed the establishment of a High Court to impeach the king. The captive monarch was taken from Hurst to Windsor and then, a day later, to St James's Palace in London, which Parliament was using as the king's prison. Before parting with his son, Charles told the boy: “The corn is in the earth;

We wait for the harvest.” He knew exactly what was coming. After a contentious trial that lasted a week, the king was found guilty and sentenced to death on January 27, 1649. Three days later, at around two in the afternoon, King Charles I of England was executed with a single blow of the axe. on the neck, prompting a deadly wail from the crowd. To his enemies, Charles I was an incompetent king and an autocratic tyrant, who was unprepared for the burden of ruling his kingdom and unwilling to concede anything significant. But he was also a devout Christian, a loving father and a man who genuinely thought he was doing the best he could for the people of England in the difficult circumstances of the 17th century.

Whichever perspective seemed truer, the king was ultimately dead. On the same day, the army parliament passed a law prohibiting the automatic succession of the late monarch's son, the future Charles II, who was at the time in exile in the Netherlands. Although he was crowned in mid-February by royalist supporters, this essentially abolished the English monarchy and, with this lack of a king, effectively began the Commonwealth of England. The death of Charles I and the conclusion of the fight for England did not mean that everyone was at peace. Ireland had been in an intermittent state of revolt since before the First Civil War broke out, and during the conflict had often been a source of Royalist soldiers.

By early 1649, the Irish Catholics were allied with the rest of Charles's supporters against the Parliamentarians, and it was clear that the situation there needed to be addressed. To this end, the Commonwealth's newly founded executive body, the Council of State, appointed the ever-reliable Thomas Fairfax. However, to his dismay, the Lord General was tired of the conflict and rejected the foreign commission. With no other option, the Council appointed his deputy, Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell, to lead the Irish expedition. Unfortunately for them, during the spring leveling mutinies broke out within some regiments of the New Model Army and paralyzed preparations.

Led by reformist figures such as John Lilburne, the radical Levellers had become disillusioned by the lack of political change in England1 after the civil war and had come to believe that the tyranny of the king had simply been changed by the tyranny of an oligarchic parliament. In what would be Lord General Fairfax's swan song as commander-in-chief of the army, he and Cromwell rallied loyal forces against the mutineers and crushed them in a night assault on 13 May near Burford. Many notable Levellers were subsequently executed and the movement as a whole lost most of its political power. With internal army unrest resolved in early summer, Cromwell finally set out on his campaign in Ireland with 12,000 soldiers and a fervent Protestant zeal against a people he would come to refer to as “wretched barbarians.” The bulk of Cromwell's fleet set sail on 14 August and arrived unopposed in Dublin Port a day later.

Ireland's royalist leadership under the Duke of Ormond believed that bleeding Cromwell out of blood and money through prolonged sieges was the best strategy after recent defeats. To that end, much of his manpower was reassigned to strengthen castles and strategic cities on the invader's route. One of these possible fortresses was Drogheda, a town located on the main road from Dublin to Belfast. It had large medieval walls and, to make it even more difficult to attack, it was divided into northern and southern sections by the River Boyne with only a drawbridge to cross between the two. However, Ormond and Sir Arthur Aston, the local commander, did not believe that Drogheda was Cromwell's main objective.

They were therefore unprepared when, on 2 September, escorts under an officer named Michael Jones appeared on the north bank to cover the western approaches. There were some minor skirmishes that did not have much effect, but the arrival of this vanguard preceded the main Parliamentary army which appeared the next day. Immediately taking note of the city's geography, Cromwell concentrated his main army force south of the Boyne and let Jones' cavalry divide the defenders' manpower. Things got worse for the Irish royalist defenders when eight heavy Parliamentary siege guns arrived by river on the 5th. After unloading them slightly downstream, the guns were organized into two batteries with converging fire, aiming at the south and south-east walls, where assault would be less costly.

The plan was simple: breach two adjacent sections of the wall, penetrate the separate but mutually supporting breaches, and capture Duleek Gate and the Boyne Drawbridge. Cromwell sent demands for Aston to surrender, but the proposals were rejected, so the assault continued. On the 9th, Parliament's guns began a bombardment that continued for two days, while Cromwell deployed his men to be ready to advance through the gap. Three regiments of infantry were posted on the eastern wall under Colonel John Hewson, while Cromwell personally led the bulk of his army and his reserve in front of the south gate. Drogheda's centuries-old fortifications held firm against the cannonade until the 11th, when two holes were blown in both axes of the southeast corner of the walls.

Reacting to the danger, Aston moved his command post to Mill Mount and ordered trenches to be dug around the breaches as a secondary defence. With the city penetrated, Cromwell hoisted a white flag of parliament over his command tent to induce Aston to come and submit. When this failed, he even sent an officer with direct orders. However, believing that relief was near, the royalist commander rejected him a second time. The Lord General intensified his eight-gun artillery barrage in response, each gun firing formidable shots ranging from 12 to 30 pounds in weight. It was all too much. By midday, Drogheda's walls were on the verge of collapse and many more holes had been made.

Cromwell prepared his men for the attack. At 5 p.m., Colonels Castle and Hewson led their front-line units into the city and initially managed to gain a foothold beyond the wall. However, a point-blank volley of royalist musketry in the middle of the rubble-strewn streets pushed the parliamentarians back. Among the casualties was Colonel Castle, whose fatal wounds collapsed the morale of the vanguard. Seeing his troops faltering, Cromwell ordered his reserve to advance and reinforce the attack, personally taking command of a regiment and fighting in the vanguard. Inspired by the presence of his general, the Parliamentarians outflanked and overwhelmed the outnumbered defenders of Drogheda, forcing Aston to send in his cavalry reserve.

In doing so, he stripped the drawbridge of the soldiers defending it and allowed Cromwell's men to assault the crucial crossing. Now surrounded and isolated on Mill Mount, Aston and his small band of comrades allowed themselves to be detained. But that day the fourth part was not to be given. For a reason that has been the subject of debate ever since, Cromwell's soldiers began massacring captured royalists with gunfire, clubs, and swords. Aston himself was reportedly beaten to death with his own wooden leg in the massacre by men who believed rumors that he kept gold inside him. With Drogheda south of the Boyne captured, the Parliamentarian soldiers, driven by religious zeal and bloodlust, crossed the undefended drawbridge and entered the northern section.

Apparently having briefly lost control of his army, Cromwell was unable to control his men as they began to indiscriminately kill any enemy soldier or civilian they came across. In a short time, most of the city came under his control, but some strongholds of resistance still remained. At some point, a group of officers approached the Lord General and asked him what should be done with a group of royalist soldiers resisting inside the bell tower of St. Peter's Church. Cromwell had his men pile up the church pews and set fires to burn the defenders. About 40 people died in the terrible fire that could be seen throughout the city.

In total, almost 3,000 defenders and a thousand civilians died at Drogheda. It is still debated whether the fervently religious Cromwell condoned the bloody fate of Drogheda out of anti-Catholic hatred or whether he was simply acting within the confines of accepted early modern laws of wartime conduct. The man himself stated about the act: “it will prevent bloodshed in the future.” A month after the Drogheda massacre, Cromwell captured the crucial port of Wexford and similarly put it to the sword. Following this, Parliamentarians continued to campaign in Ireland throughout the winter and into the new year, frustrating any hope the future Charles II had of finding effective support there.

Cromwell himself left his son-in-law in command of Ireland and finally set out for England in May 1650, because a new emergency had arisen at home. Since mid-March, the dead king's heir had been playing two sides in a clever political game, both hoping to renew the royalist alliance with Covenanter Scotland, controlled by a Kirk party that had come to believe that parliament He would never fulfill his oaths, while at the same time, hedging his bets with his enemies. Even worse than the failure to impose Presbyterianism wasthe common fear among the Scots that England's kingless New Model Army would attempt to impose a similar republicanism on them too, a prospect that was completely anathema to the Scottish nobility.

All of this led to negotiations between the Covenanters and Charles the Younger, which began in March 1650 in the Dutch city of Breda2. When talks stalled, the king-in-exile placed a formidable and staunch royalist piece on his side of the chessboard: the Marquis of Montrose. After his defeat at Philiphaugh, Montrose had bounced between the courts of Europe trying to gain support, and after Charles I's execution he immediately offered his services to the late king's son. Aiming to light a fire under the Covenanter's feet, Charles sent Montrose back to Scotland with a mercenary army in April. Unfortunately for the unreservedly loyal marquis, he was just a pawn in a ruthless political game.

His invasion accelerated Breda's deliberations, but that did not prevent his small army from being decisively defeated on 27 April when he was ambushed at Carbisdale. Just a few days later, Charles and the Scots signed the Treaty of Breda. In exchange for an oath to institute Presbyterianism throughout the British Isles and the repudiation of royalists in Ireland and Scotland, especially the hated Montrose, Covenanter Scotland would grant Charles his support to restore him to the throne. After being captured after Carbisdale, Montrose was taken to Edinburgh in chains, where he was hanged, drawn and quartered at the end of May.

The man who was among the dead monarch's strongest allies was cut off and abandoned by his son. With the Breda agreement concluded, Charles sailed from the Netherlands to Scotland, disembarking on June 233. Parliament observes the situation in the far north with justified concern. A day later, in London, 500 miles to the south, a special committee appointed by the Council of State met to decide who would lead an upcoming preemptive invasion of Scotland. His initial choice, Thomas Fairfax, declined the commission objecting to an offensive war. Then, recently returning from Ireland, Oliver Cromwell was appointed Lord General in his place.

Together with some 16,000 veterans and their capable officers, the New Model Army headed north and finally crossed the Scottish border on 22 July. Rather than confront one of the greatest generals of the time with an unprepared and undermanned army, General Covenanter David Leslie fortified a line of forts stretching from Leith to Canongate. Anchored by terrain features on both flanks, Edinburgh's defensive shield was a formidable obstacle that the Scottish army could safely behind. Dunbar, a seaport crucial to the invasion's logistical links, was taken without significant resistance two days after crossing the border. Cromwell advanced further along the Firth, but was forced to halt at Leith upon encountering Leslie's defences.

After a brief attempt to break the line, the Lord General realized that it would not be possible before supplies ran out. In terrible weather conditions5, the Parliamentarian army retreated towards the Tweed from 30 July, but was harassed by Leslie's Covenanter cavalry all the way, suffering many losses. Slightly battered, Cromwell and his men arrived back at Dunbar on August 5. Around the same time, Charles arrived in Leith. The Lord General of Parliament attempted a second time to overcome the stronghold of forts flanking Edinburgh to the south, but again failed due to the outbreak of dysentery and the damp summer weather.

On August 31, Cromwell withdrew the worn-out army back to Dunbar; His forces were now only 7,500 infantry and 3,500 cavalry. Sensing the possibility of crippling the already weakened New Model Army, Leslie sent one of his infantry brigades to take the Cockburnspath Pass, beyond Dunbar, cutting Cromwell's line of supply, reinforcement and retreat. Meanwhile, the bulk of his army, some 14,000 men, secured the prominent Doon Hill, overlooking both Dunbar and the Berwick road. Such high, impregnable terrain would normally have served as a tactical foothold.Benefit6, but endless wind and rain battered Leslie's exposed troops stationed on the hilltop. That, plus the deteriorating supply situation and Cromwell's apparent weakness, prompted the Scots to descend Doon Hill at dawn on 2 September.

There, under cover on lower ground, they deployed for battle just south of Broxburn Ravine, prompting the observer Cromwell to declare: "God is delivering them into our hands, they are descending towards us." Ignoring the concerns of some of his less bold officers, Cromwell ordered his exhausted and hungry army forward, arranging them in a conventional battle line along the ravine and facing the Scots. A minor skirmish between scouting units took place near Brand Hill, but the remainder of the daylight was used primarily for redeployment. At some point, Leslie ordered most of his cavalry, some 18 regiments, to exchange flanks and concentrate on the Berwick road, where it was easier to cross the Broxburn.

The impassable inner flank was now guarded mainly by Scottish infantry. Night fell and the parliamentary command was no less worried than before. The army was exhausted, their supply situation was sketchy at best, and they were trapped in Scotland with an enemy army between them and their home. To decide what would be the best course of action, Cromwell called a council of war in the early hours of September 3. Most of the regiment's colonels reiterated their desire to send in infantry and attack with cavalry, but Major General John Lambert dismissed the prospect and inspiringly argued for an attack.

In his view, Leslie's Scots were in an incredibly vulnerable position. Having descended from the lofty heights of Doon Hill, their backs were now literally against a wall. With a little skill and luck, the Scottish flank could turn and crash into that same wall. Still somewhat nervous, Cromwell and the other officers gave their consent. Under cover of darkness, the English began to break their conventional formation and form in a single column on the Berwick road, one brigade behind the other. The advance began at 4 in the morning with a cannonade against the half-asleep Scottish left7 and the rapid capture of the crossing points across the Broxburn by Monck's infantry vanguard and part of the supporting cavalry.

During a subsequent half-hour lull in the fighting, Leslie's officers failed to shift their forces to effectively counter Cromwell's plan of attack and were defeated. Lambert crossed the ravine with his first mounted line soon after and charged the Scottish horsemen of his companion, Major General Montgomerie, who were opposing him. Surprised by the New Model's ferocious assault at dawn, Leslie's beleaguered first line of soldiers on the right wing were swept from the field. At about the same time, Monck crossed the Broxburn with his highly trained infantry brigade just to Lambert's right and marched directly towards an opposing unit of newly recruited Scottish recruits led by General Lumsden.

It wasn't even a challenge, as Monck tore through his opponents with ease and broke the unit, wounding and capturing Lumsden in the process. Despite their relatively rapid collapse, Lumsden's fledglings had held out long enough for reinforcements to appear under the command of Campbell de Lawer. They charged and completely crushed Monck's weary brigade in a brutal sword-point fight, completely knocking it out of the battle and shoring up the line. That was not the worst of the parliament's problems. While Lambert's victorious cavalry was still regrouping for another maneuver, Colonel Strachan's second line of Scottish soldiers advanced and attacked, throwing Lambert back across the retreating Broxburn.

Fortunately for the major general, he also had a second line which he brought forward to reinforce the left wing, charging directly at Strachan's men and pinning them in a head-on fight. As he did so, Cromwell led his personal mounted guard and turned close to the coast, charging toward the Scottish wing. This was the last straw. All the cavalry units of Leslie's maritime wing broke, dying where they stood or fleeing. Some of them sped back along the road to Cockburnspath, and others turned towards Haddington. However, there was no persecution. Discipline had always been one of the Ironsides' greatest character traits and they demonstrated this once again at Dunbar when Cromwell and Lambert called for an immediate halt.

As they had done at Marston Moor and Naseby, the Parliamentary horse regrouped in good order. Now exposed because his cavalry was destroyed, the uncommitted infantry brigades on Leslie's left side were completely unprepared when the New Model infantry turned and began advancing in line against Doon Hill. Cromwell and Lambert delivered the coup de grace by riding into the Scots' rear, destroying Lawers' Campbell unit who fought to the last man. The Scots had nothing left to do but flee. The few who could escaped from the battlefield in the same direction as their mounted comrades, but hundreds were massacred.

Surprisingly, up to 6,000 Leslie soldiers were captured in the Dunbar disaster. The general himself retired to Stirling Castle with a few thousand fugitives. With Scotland's army shattered, Edinburgh capitulated to English Parliamentary forces on 7 September, but the "Third Civil War" in Scotland and England would continue. The final campaign of Britain's terrible nine-year series of conflicts was fought in the late summer of 1651, when Cromwell lured Charles to invade England from the north. Leaving Lieutenant General George Monck in Scotland to oversee a force of 6,000 of his worst soldiers, Cromwell gathered the rest of his army and hurried south, marching twenty miles a day in one of the hottest summer climates in recent memory. time.

Within a week, Cromwell's Puritans had reached the River Tyne and entered the small border town of Ferrybridge on 19 August. From here, Cromwell ordered Lambert to continue examining Charles's army. Thanks to Lambert's effective cavalry scouts, Cromwell knew every step of the royalists. Cromwell was surprised, although he was pleased, to learn that the local population of northern England was still clinging to the Puritan banner rather than supporting the Royalist cause. The common people here perceived Charles' entry into northern England as an open invasion by Scottish bandits. Throughout northern and central England, county militias were formed and moved into key positions to block any Royalist activity and defend the capital of London.

Although Cromwell had a deep disdain for militias, his sheer size and pool of volunteers available to him helped demoralize Charles and his Scottish army, forcing them to stop and rethink his strategy. Sixteen miles east of Liverpool along the River Mersey at Warrington, Charles's army encountered a mixed contingent of Cheshire and Staffordshire militia companies, supplemented by Lambert's veteran squadrons of cavalry. The Royalists attacked on 16 August, forcing the Puritans to withdraw from the bridge over the Mersey, as the marshy terrain made mounted combat by Lambert's mounted troops impossible. He also had orders not to provoke a general confrontation.

And so the cavalry retreated, to the great joy and delight of the Scots, who brandished their swords and mocked the retreating horsemen. Although Charles had won an almost bloodless victory at Warrington, his top advisers were still deeply concerned. Leslie was the most concerned, noting that there was little evidence of large-scale defections to the Royalist cause. Faced with similar concerns from his other advisors, Charles relented and abandoned his hopes of marching directly on London, opting instead to advance westwards towards the loyalist-leaning territories along the Welsh border. He believed that he could recruit more royalists to his cause in the western counties, especially among the hard-fighting Welsh.

He also gave him an open line of retreat toward the coast if the situation made it necessary. Reluctantly, Charles ordered his army to move westwards, towards the crossroads of the city of Worcester along the River Severn, which forms the eastern border of Wales. The royalists, tired and exhausted by the march, arrived in Worcester on August 22 and immediately began reinforcing the city's defenses. Charles ordered all local males between the ages of 16 and 60 to gather in a field outside Worcester, where they heard a passionatespeech from the king, who implored men to join the ranks, promising good pay and a pardon for anyone who joined. the cause of it.

Only a few hundred recruits joined his army, but they would not be enough to confront the much larger Puritan army under Cromwell, which scouts said was approaching his position. Charles told one of his closest confidants: "To me, it's either a crown or a coffin." Two days later, on August 24, Cromwell arrived at Warwick, forty miles east of Worcester. Here, he combined his battle-hardened regular regiments with a large contingent of volunteers to form an army of 27,000 men. Cromwell would now, for the first time in his career, have a two-to-one advantage over his opponent. Charles attempted to even the odds against Cromwell by sending Sir Edward Massey and 300 men to guard the nearest crossing point of the Severn, nine miles south of Worcester at Upton.

Massey had orders from Charles to destroy the only bridge crossing the river, but for some unknown reason, Massey delayed this action. Meanwhile, Lambert arrived at the scene with his cavalry scouts and found that the bridge was neither destroyed nor guarded. He sent a squadron of dragoons racing across the bridge to seize the high ground at Upton Church. Now alerted to the enemy threat, Massey counterattacked, but Lambert sent more reinforcements and forced the royalists to retreat. Massey was seriously injured during the skirmish and had to be carried off the field. With a secure foothold at both ends of the river, Cromwell sent a column of regulars and militiamen under Lieutenant General Charles Fleetwood to reinforce Lambert's position and expand the beachhead.

Before long, 14,000 Parliamentary troops had gathered on the western bank of the river, forcing Charles to divide his already greatly outnumbered garrison. Many of Charles's senior officers were disheartened by the rapidly deteriorating situation in Worcester. Meanwhile, Cromwell advanced deliberately, concentrating the bulk of his army on two hills, Red Hill and Perry Wood, east of Worcester. He placed his heavy artillery batteries between the two hills, but refrained from firing to allow his men to build a pontoon bridge across the Severn at its confluence with the shallower River Teme. Fleetwood would lead the crossings there, while Colonel Richard Deane would lead a second column to storm Powick Bridge, just a few miles west of the Severn.

Choosing not to attack Worcester head-on, Cromwell wanted to maneuver his army to trap the royalists in a tight noose around the city, forcing Charles to abandon his favorable defensive position to attack Cromwell in a pitched battle east of the city. It was the same plan he had used at Dunbar a year earlier. Just before 6:00 a.m. m. On September 3, a year after Cromwell's great victory at Dunbar, the Battle of Worcester began as the Puritans launched their attack. The 5,000 men under Fleetwood advanced west along the banks of the Severn, slowing their movement to cover a caravan of 20 ships heading towards the site of the pontoon bridge further east.

While Charles observed these events through his telescope in the tower of Worcester Cathedral, he sent two brigades under General Robert Montgomerie to hold the line at Teme. Colonel Sir William Keith's brigade was sent to defend Powick Bridge, while Major General Pitscottie's Scottish Highlanders were ordered to engage the Puritans in their efforts to cross the bridge at the confluence of the river. Most of the cavalry under Leslie moved north to Worcester, where the nervous general kept his soldiers out of the fight. The knight was already planning to cover a retreat from the field. The Scottish defenders at the confluence, rallied by a brief appearance by Charles at his post along the Teme, held firm against strong Puritan attacks.

The Highlanders even managed to repulse several of the enemy's attempts to cross the stream at Powick Bridge. Meanwhile, Fleetwood's float-floating efforts further east were having little success. Seeing the lack of progress, Cromwell sent a contingent of troops across the Severn by boat to protect the disputed triangle between the junction of the two rivers. He ordered the men to raise pontoon bridges "at gun range", just 50 meters from the royalists, in preparation for receiving reinforcements to take advantage of an advance. Despite suffering intense fire, the Puritan pontoons managed to build their bridges, and between 3:00 and 4:00 p.m. m., Cromwell personally led a carefully selected entourage, including his own bodyguard and the veteran infantry regiments of Colonels Francis Hacker, Richard Ingoldsby, and Charles Fairfax, across the river.

Meanwhile, the Highlanders were poorly led by Pitscottie and were too far away to fight the growing Puritan beachhead. Puritan horse reinforcements managed to encircle the flanks of the defenders in the open field west of the river. Now that the pressure on his forehead had been partially relieved, Fleetwood finally placed his own pontoon bridge across the Teme to threaten the Scottish flank at Powick Bridge. Colonel Keith led his troops in a strategic retreat towards Worcester, fighting for every tree, bush and hedge between the bridge and the city. Finally, running out of ammunition after hours of fighting, the Scots were defeated, breaking ranks to take refuge in Worcester while others rushed to escape the Puritan trap around the city.

Amid the growing confusion, Colonel Keith was seriously wounded and Montgomerie was captured. Returning to Worcester Cathedral, Charles decided that he would lead his men out of the city, as Cromwell had hoped, and force the Puritans into a pitched battle east of the Severn at Red Hill. As more and more Cromwell regiments entered the triangle west of the Severn, Charles believed that a sudden and forceful counterattack could break the Puritan lines. Driving his men out of the city, Charles' royalists overran the poorly trained militia and musketeer pickets behind a group of hedges, drove off a troop of Puritan horses, and even managed to capture Cromwell's artillery.

For a moment, the fate of the battle, and the fate of both Cromwell and Charles, hung in the balance. Charles' brave charge, ably assisted by the Duke of Hamilton, came close to achieving a surprising victory in the eleven-hour battle. But the ever-reliable John Lambert stood his ground with his squadron of horses. With his own mount shot out from under him, Lambert assumed command of the untested militia companies, holding his ground against Charles's attacks until Cromwell could hasten the return of reinforcements across the river. All Royalist hopes of victory were dashed as they launched desperate attacks against the solid Puritan line.

At 5:00 p.m. m., the battle was coming to an end, although there were still small firefights and instances of last-minute actions breaking out across the lines. Among the dead was the Duke of Hamilton, whose own father had been a previous victim of Cromwell. Many of the Scots sought refuge in the rampart defenses of Fort Royal, a small redoubt overlooking Sidbury Gate. Despite a personal plea from Charles to come out and fight, the Scots would take no more. The defenders of the redoubt would later reject a call for surrender from Cromwell, and 1,500 Scots would die fighting, annihilated to the last man by the Puritans.

Defeated but not panicked, the young king raced through Worcester in an attempt to rally his men for another charge. Leslie was of no use to the defeated monarch. At Sidbury Gate, Charles made a last effort to rally his men, but it was too late. Frustrated, he shouted, "I would rather you shoot me than let me live to see the consequences of this fatal day!" Instead, Royalist cavalrymen led by the Earl of Cleveland galloped up High Street to buy time for Charles to escape through St. Martin's Gate further north. Overrun on three sides, the Royalist army was completely destroyed and 2,000 defenders at Worcester were killed.

The streets and sewers of Worcester were stained red with blood. Between 6 and 10,000 royalists were captured that day, including all the surviving Scottish commanders. The English captives would be recruited into the New Model Army and sent to Ireland for further service. Less fortunate Scots were deported to New England, Bermuda, and the West Indies to work a life of indentured servitude on English plantations. Very few of the Scots who had invaded northern England that summer ever saw their homeland, Scotland, again. The fighting was almost over by nightfall. That night Cromwell announced Parliament's surprising victory over Charles. The future King Charles managed to escape the battle, managing in one episode to evade parliamentary patrols by hiding in an oak tree on the grounds of Boscobel House.

He eventually reached the southern coast of England and escaped to Normandy. Charles would not return to his native country for another nine years, living in exile in France, the Spanish Netherlands, and the Dutch Republic during that time. The crushing defeat at Dunbar had dealt a mortal blow to the Scottish cause and, in 1652, the Kingdom was completely absorbed into the Commonwealth of England. After this, Cromwell's young regime had assumed control of the entire island of Great Britain, but there were still matters of state beyond the islands' shores for him to resolve. The brutality of Cromwell's army during the Irish campaign that took place between 1649 and 1650 is considered by many to be a black mark on the career of an already controversial man, and his policies in Ireland in the following years did little to improve his reputation among the inhabitants of the Emerald Isle both past and present.

The massacres of Drogheda and Wexford had only inflamed the determination of the Catholic Gaels to stand against the Puritan tide, but by the end of 1651 the last important native strongholds of Limerick and Galway had been besieged by Parliamentary forces and starved into submission. . After this, the Irish no longer had the resources or manpower to take on the New Model Army, but continued to fight using asymmetrical guerrilla tactics. Up to 30,000 men hid in swamps, mountains and forests. Living as outlaws, they attacked isolated patrols and supply wagons, turning the entire countryside into a practical death zone for any English soldier who dared to walk more than two miles beyond their military camp.

Cromwell's response was indiscriminately brutal. Under him, parliamentary forces systematically destroyed the food reserves of any county suspected of supplying the rebels. This caused an island-wide famine, which in turn facilitated an outbreak of bubonic plague. In total, the combination of war, famine and disease took a catastrophic toll, killing between 20% and 40% of Ireland's total population. In addition, another approximately 50,000 Irish captives were reduced to indentured servitude and sent abroad to the English colonies in North America and the Caribbean. In 1652, driven by his disdain for the Catholic faith and desire to end the unrest on the island once and for all, Cromwell instituted a series of openly discriminatory policies against the native population and their Church.

All Catholics were banished from the main Irish cities, which had been predominantly Anglo-Protestant in character since before the war, while rewards were offered to Catholic priests, who were persecuted and executed. In addition to all this, huge tracts of land were confiscated from Catholic landowners, even those who had not participated in the rebellion, and given them to the Protestants; often veterans of the New Model Army. In 1652, Ireland was at the mercy of England, and the three Kingdoms in the titular War of the Three Kingdoms were under the complete control of Oliver Cromwell's regime. However, his English Commonwealth still had one more war to fight.

For decades, England and the Dutch Republic had been friends, with the former supporting the latter in their war for independence against the Spanish Empire. However, throughout the English Civil War, these relations had become increasingly strained, as both Royalists and Parliamentarians had placed embargoes on Dutch merchant ships suspected of trading with the opposing side. This, in combination with a series of other trade disputes born from the consequences of the chaos of the war, resulted in the outbreak of open war between the two powers. In the end, neither side was able to decisively crush the other in this conflict, which was overwhelmingly fought at sea.

However, the English emerged with the advantage, as their privateer pirates invoked the spirit of Sir Francis Drake and wreaked havoc on the routes.Dutch merchant shipping, paralyzing the Dutch economy. From the moment he freed King Charles's royal collar from his royal shoulders, Cromwell's home community had been in an incredibly precarious position. However, after his parade of military triumphs, from the subjugation of Scotland and Ireland to the humiliation of the Netherlands, his infant English Republic had gained international legitimacy, gaining official recognition from the French, Spanish, Dutch and Danes, asserting control over your New Zealand. World colonies in Barbados and North America, and nullify any further threat of Royalist invasions.

Although Cromwell's Commonwealth military record was practically brilliant, his internal situation left much to be desired. In 1651, Parliament was essentially a skeleton crew, reduced to half its original members due to extensive purges during the civil war. This chronically understaffed political body, known as the Rump Parliament, proved completely incompetent at drafting legislation, such as when they passed the Navigation Act of 1651, an aggressively protectionist import-export policy that led directly to war before mentioned with the Dutch Republic. Following the deposition of their monarchy and the dawn of a new era, the people of England, including Cromwell, clamored for sweeping reforms.

In this, the Rump Parliament also failed to consistently live up to expectations, failed to address the religious and social issues of its time, and generally simply failed to do anything except the self-indulgent re-election of its own members. By 20 April 1653, Cromwell had had enough of this incompetence and rallied his army to expel the Parliamentarians from Westminster at gunpoint, temporarily eliminating all vestiges of civil government in the Commonwealth and putting the military back under control. charge of England. Thereafter, Cromwell and his military high command took the formation of a new parliament into their own hands. By July 4, they had appointed 140 new men to Westminster.

This new parliament, known as the Nominated Parliament, was an unelected body, elected not by the people but by a small group of military elites. In theory, its members were supposed to represent the various peoples of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland; In practice, the representatives of Scotland and Ireland were English soldiers who had been appointed there after the subjugation of those two countries by the English Commonwealth. Cromwell's reasoning was that by carefully selecting only people who were appropriately pious and sympathetic to religious reforms, he would form a state apparatus that would have a unified purpose and actually get things done.

Unfortunately, simply being “godly” and generally open to change turned out to be too broad a qualification. In the end, the Nominated Parliament became an eclectic mess of conflicting worldviews, with pragmatic lawyers who wanted sensible legal reviews clashing with apocalyptic preachers, esoteric mystics and all manner of religious fanatics. This ideological schizophrenia finally paralyzed any attempt at productive cooperation, and after five months of constant infighting, the appointed parliament was dissolved on December 12, 1653, returning power to Cromwell and the army. For the second time in eight months, the existing government and constitution had collapsed, and in the resulting power vacuum, effective government control had fallen to the military and its commander-in-chief.

Cromwell is often portrayed as a power-hungry tyrant. But it must be recognized that, although he was given every opportunity to become a military dictator, he constantly attempted to make a representative civilian government work. After the collapse of the Nominated Parliament, he and his military elites went back to the drawing board. On December 16, one of his most decorated field commanders, Major General John Lambert, had devised a new government plan. This was a document known as the Instrument of Government, which has the distinction of being the first codified and written sovereign constitution in the history of England. The Government Instrument proposed a three-tier government.

The first level would be a parliament of 400 men, who this time would be elected by the voters they represent. The second would be a 15-member state council. The third level would be the Lord Protector: a single man who held supreme executive power and would act as head of state. It should be no surprise at all which man was assigned to take on this prestigious mantle. On 16 December 1653, the new government was established and Cromwell was officially inaugurated as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Despite his grandiose new title, Lord Protector Cromwell was by no means an absolute dictator.

The three branches of his new government checked each other, while the Lord Protector himself needed the majority consent of his Council of State before taking many actions, such as calling on the army when Parliament was not sitting or declaring war on foreign countries. . powers. Unfortunately, Cromwell's lofty ideals of a free and representative democracy did not survive the realities of such a thing. Since elections to the Parliament of the First Protectorate were held freely, many of Cromwell's enemies were sent to Westminster, including Scottish presbyteries, royalists, fierce critics of the New Model Army, and members of the old Rump Parliament who had unfinished business. with the Lord Protector for kicking them out of their previous job at gunpoint.

It did not take long for Cromwell to tire, as his political goals were constantly thwarted by his opponents in parliament, who constantly attempted to limit the Lord Protector's power and reduce the size of his army. Meanwhile, in the New World, Cromwell's navy captured the island of Santiago from the Spanish, which would become the English colony of Jamaica. In early 1655, Cromwell's contentious relationship with the Parliament of the First Protectorate came to a head when they attempted to pass a radical constitutional reform bill that would increase their power at Cromwell's expense. The Lord Protector's response was forceful and authoritative.

On January 22 he dissolved parliament. There was a poetic irony in this action, for it ultimately made Cromwell as despotic as the late and beheaded Charles I, who had been equally happy to take the proverbial dance and go home when Parliament had not toed his line. game. Cromwell's slide into authoritarianism continued in March, when one Sir John Penruddock, a devout monarchist, launched an uprising against the Commonwealth to restore the exiled prince Charles II to the throne of England. This revolt was, to put it bluntly, pathetic. Penruddock was barely able to raise more than 300 men to his cause and the insurrection was put down in less than three days.

Penruddock may have been as big a threat to Cromwell as an ant is to a boot, but his uprising gave the Lord Protector the excuse he needed to repeal the Constitution and install a military dictatorship known as the "Major Generals' Government." ". In this new system, England and Wales were divided into twelve districts, each governed directly by the incumbent major general of Cromwell's army. Reflecting Cromwell's own religious inclinations, these military despots were often stern and gloomy Puritans who forbade "ungodly" behavior such as music, excessive drinking, dancing, fairs, and the celebration of Christmas. Unsurprisingly, these “no fun allowed” generalissimo were extremely unpopular with the general population and caused public support for Lord Protector Cromwell and his regime to plummet.

By 1656, Cromwell had bowed to public pressure, thrown his major generals under the proverbial bus, and reconstituted Parliament. However, this Parliament of the Second Protectorate was downright regressive compared to the first. On the one hand, its members were no longer democratically elected but, like the Nominated Parliament, were personally chosen by Cromwell from among his supporters. All dissidents in the First Protectorate Parliament who had opposed him had been purged. On 26 June 1657, Oliver Cromwell was ritually reinstated as Lord Protector at Westminster Hall. This lavish ceremony was a coronation in all but name. Cromwell sat in King Edward's chair, clothed in a robe lined with purple ermine and provided with a sword of justice and a scepter.

It should be noted that although Cromwell's fawning Parliament had offered to crown him king, he flatly refused, insisting on retaining the title of Lord Protector. However, with his slide into authoritarianism and his utter disregard for dissenting political voices, it was clear that the firebrand general who had deposed a tyrant based on the principles of republican liberty was gone. Oliver Cromwell was now a monarch in all but name. Seeing his once dogmatic and revolutionary leader become what they had fought for, many of Cromwell's closest supporters began to turn against him. By the end of 1657, Parliament, which was supposed to be filled with his puppetry, had even begun to challenge him, readmitting former parliamentarians from his earlier political purges.

By now, Cromwell was simply running out of steam. In 1658, the Lord Protector's health was beginning to deteriorate and, in August of that year, his daughter died of illness at the age of 29. After that, Cromwell had more or less given up. A lifetime of fighting, politicking and clinging to power had taken its toll. God's chosen Englishman had deposed the monarchy, but ultimately failed to establish a stable government in its place. On September 3, 1658, Oliver Cromwell died of sepsis following a urinary tract infection. His son, Richard Cromwell, succeeded him as Lord Protector, but Richard's rule was dead upon his arrival.

Unable to control either Parliament or the army, he was quickly deposed. In his place, the Rump Parliament that his father had dissolved in 1653 regained control of the country. In the political chaos that followed, a royalist general, George Monck, took control of the Rump Parliament, eventually facilitating a royal restoration. On 29 May 1660, Charles II entered London after a ten-year exile and reclaimed the throne his father had lost. The Royal House of Stuart was officially back in power and England's republican experiment was officially over. We'll be talking about the history of Britain and early modern history in general in the coming weeks and months, so make sure you're subscribed and have pressed the bell button to watch them.

Please consider liking, subscribing, commenting and sharing; It's a great help. Recently, we have started publishing weekly exclusive content for YouTube sponsors and members. Consider joining their ranks via the link in the description or the button below the video to watch these weekly videos, learn about our schedule, get early access to our videos, access our private discord. , and much more. This is the Kings and Generals channel, and we will see you in the next one.