The English Civil War
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘The English Civil War’
Royalist soldier Sir Jacob Ashly exemplified a Christian gentleman in the heat of battle.
As secretary to the Chancellor of Oxford University, William King moved among elevated but sometimes tactless company. He remembered one dinner-time conversation in 1715 during which Sir William Wyndham, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, joked about prayer right in front of Lord Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester.
The first battle of the English Civil War was a cautious affair, but rumours persisted that it went on long after it had finished.
The Battle of Edgehill in Warwickshire on October 23rd, 1642, marked the opening exchanges in the English Civil War. It was indecisive, and neither side could have foreseen the military coup in December 1648 that would lead so quickly to a brief Republic. Indeed, following the skirmish King Charles was more interested in paranormal activity.
Charles took his rights and duties as a King with religious seriousness, but Parliament’s sense of both right and duty was just as strong.
King Charles I of England and Scotland (1600-1649) was charming, clever and convinced that he had inherited a divine right and duty to govern the country his own way. Parliament disagreed, demanding a constitutional role in law-making and criticising his policies. It did not seem likely to end well.
When Parliament overthrew the capricious tyranny of Charles I, it discovered an uncomfortable truth about power.
For eleven years, between 1649 and 1660, Britain was a republic. Great claims are sometimes made for this ‘interregnum’, as if it were the birth of democracy, but really it proved only one thing: be it under monarchy or republic, be it at court or in parliament, power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Young Montague Bertie, Lord Willougby, tended his dying father behind enemy lines.
At eight o’clock on the morning of the 23rd of October, 1642, King Charles I gazed down on the field of Edgehill, and the Parliamentarian army that awaited him there. It was the start of the English Civil War, which would all but end with the King’s execution in January 1649.