Origins of the English Civil War

An Overview of the English Civil War

The English Civil Wars were a devastating series of conflicts that took place in the mid-17th century. Fought between Royalists (Cavaliers) loyal to King Charles I, and Parliamentarians (Roundheads), the war split every aspect of English society. CRAY interviewed Stuart Orme, Director of the Cromwell Museum in Huntingdon to provide us with short summary of the causes that led to conflict.  Watch the video to understand the fundamental questions about power and religion that brought about the war, then read Peter Daniel’s overview of the conflict and how it related to Crayford.

 ‘The Warre was begun in our streets before the King or Parliament had any Armies’.  Richard Baxter

Puritan Richard Baxter believed that the origins of the English Civil War could be seen in the divisions that existed in every town and village in England in the first half of the 17th century. You can certainly see this microcosm of national troubles in Crayford.  To supplement Stuart Orme’s interview, this article will provide an overview of the conflict and make reference to events in Crayford and surrounding areas of Kent and London

Between 1642 and 1651, armies loyal to King Charles I and Parliament faced off in three civil wars over longstanding disputes about religious freedom and how the “three kingdoms” of England, Scotland and Ireland should be governed. The war had a massive impact on this country.  An estimated 200,000 people lost their lives directly or indirectly as a result of the English Civil Wars, making it arguably the bloodiest conflict in the history of the British Isles.   The war also led to the execution of King Charles I in 1649, 11 years of republican rule in England and the establishment of Britain’s first standing national army through the creation of the New Model Army.

The Stuart Dynasty and King Charles I

A childless Elizabeth I died in 1603, which meant an end to the Tudor dynasty. Her heir was her Stuart cousin, King James VI of Scotland, who became King James I of England Scotland and Ireland which united the three kingdoms for the first time. Catholics welcomed James’ coronation as they hoped he would be favourable to them because he had had a Catholic mother, Mary Queen of Scots.  However, their optimism proved to be groundless. He continued Tudor restrictions on Roman Catholics, which led in 1605 to the infamous Gunpowder Plot.

Charles I succeeded his father in 1625. His marriage to a French, Catholic princess, Henrietta Maria of France was deeply unpopular with strict protestants in England known as Puritans. They feared that this foreign ‘papist’ Queen would seek to attempt a counter-reformation, as Mary Tudor had seventy years before. Their fears seemed to be valid when Charles I tried to impose a Book of Common Prayer on the country that seemed to hark back to the Catholic traditions of the Anglican church. Crayford’s rector Thomas Vane, as Chaplain Extraordinaire to King Charles I, was close to the Queen and saw how Puritans tried to intimidate her during his chaplaincy at Somerset House on the Strand.

These tensions were very apparent in Crayford. Local Puritans, like Lord of the Manor William Draper, came into conflict with the rector of Crayford Thomas Vane who supported the King’s attempts to support old traditions of worship. For example, local Puritans objected to St Paulinus church having an altar rail restored following the fire of 1629.  The argument was so bad that Vane brought the Archbishop of Canterbury himself to Crayford in 1633 to settle it in his favour.  These petty disputes in Crayford were a fair reflection of what was occurring across the country in the 1620s and 1630s

Charles came to the throne believing strongly in what his father James had taught him regarding the divine rule of kings. In the first years of his reign, this brought him into constant conflict with Members of Parliament.  Mary Draper’s father, Richard Cresheld, was an M.P. at this time and was at the centre of national events in 1628. Cresheld helped to draft the Petition of Right to stop King Charles I imposing forced loans and imprisoning people without trial.  The King responded by dissolving parliament in 1629; he would not recall it for the next 11 years.  By the time it returned, the country was on the brink of Civil War.

At the end of the 1630s, Charles I tried to impose the Anglican Book of Common Prayer and an episcopal church (a church hierarchy based around bishops) on a Presbyterian, Scottish kirk (church).  This provoked fierce resistance from the Scots, who refused to comply, and instead drew up their own list of demands, as to how their church should be governed.  This Solemn Covenant put the Scots in headlong opposition to their king.  The Scots declared war on Charles I in defence of their kirk (church).  Charles who had dissolved parliament did not have sufficient funds to fight them so when a Scots army attacked England he was unable to stop them.

After this crushing defeat King Charles I desperately sought funds to fight the Scots, but was determined to raise money without calling for a return of parliament.  He knew that any funds they provided for him would be accompanied by attempts to restrict his power.  Charles sought financial help from the Dutch to fight the Bishop’s Wars with the Scots. In May 1640, he arranged for his nine-year-old daughter Princess Royal Mary Stuart to marry the fifteen-year-old Prince Willem of Nassau, heir to the Dutch House of Orange.  Dr Thomas Vane, as the King’s Chaplain Extraordinaire, was ordered to prepare the couple for marriage.   It was during these months, whilst visiting the royal household at Somerset House, that Vane made the decision to convert to Catholicism.

A Dutch dowry was not sufficient to finance the Bishops Wars and so Charles was forced to recall Parliament in 1640 to generate the money to pay his own troops and settle the conflict. As Charles expected, Parliament provided the money but insisted on restrictions on the king’s powers.  Symbolic of this loss of power was the way parliament forced Charles to sign the death warrant of his chief minister and ally, Lord Strafford.  Charles never forgave himself for condemning Strafford to death.

To make a bad situation worse for Charles I, the Catholic majority in Ireland rebelled, killing hundreds of Protestants there in October 1641. This inflamed religious tensions in England, as Charles and Parliament disagreed on how to respond to this Catholic uprising. Parliament angered at his response drew up their, ‘Grand Remonstrance’-a list of complaints against the king. A furious Charles responded in January 1642, by trying and failing to arrest five members of Parliament, who had drawn up the document. Fearing for his own safety, Charles fled London for Nottingham, where he raised his standard and called upon his supporters to prepare for war.

Crayford was so close to London that it was always going to be controlled by the forces of parliament. Lord of the Manor, William Draper, came out strongly for parliament. On 9th January 1640, local Puritans in Dartford, Stone and Horton Kirby had sent a petition to parliament accusing Crayford rector Thomas Vane of ‘pernicious popery’ due to his close relations with Queen Henrietta-Maria.  They asked Kent M.P. Sir Edward Dering to remove him as rector.  When war was declared in 1642, Dr Thomas Vane was forced to escape with his family to Paris. He had secretly converted to Catholicism at Somerset House under the influence of the Queen and her Catholic chaplain Father Cyprien.  In Paris, he wrote a book dedicated to the Queen and explained why he had converted to Catholicism: ‘ A Lost Sheep Returned Home. (1642)’

First English Civil War (1642-46)

When the English Civil War began in August 1642, Royalist forces ( Cavaliers) controlled northern and western England, while Parliamentarians (Roundheads) dominated the south of England including Crayford and the rest of Kent. Initially, the Royalists appeared to be winning the war.  By 1643, the King had reached an agreement with Irish Catholics to end the Irish Rebellion, which freed up men to fight for him in England.  With the Royalist cause in the ascendancy, Crayfordians were emboldened to rebel against parliament in July 1643.  Crayford blacksmith William Parry led an uprising against the West Kent tax collector for Parliament, Thomas Weller of Tonbridge.  However, an alliance between Parliament and the Presbyterian Scots led to a change in fortune for parliament. The Scots were able to provide for them with a large army to swell their numbers in January 1644.

Second English Civil War (1648-49) and the execution of King Charles I

Charles escaped from the Siege of Oxford hoping to seek the help of his fellow Scots to continue his fight.  However, they sold him for £400,000 to the Roundheads, who imprisoned him.  Whilst he was in prison the victorious soldiers of the New Model Army began to debate what format England’s governance should take now that the First Civil War was finished. They famously met at St Mary’s Church, Putney where the ideas of the Levellers were debated.  This included the idea of universal suffrage.

With parliament in firm control of England, they tried to tighten their grip on power.  At Christmas 1647 they were determined to enforce their 1644 ordinance banning Christmas from being celebrated.  They advocated, in the words of Water Poet John Taylor, ‘a world turned upside down’.  In this upside-down world, Churches closed and shops opened on Christmas day.  This led to the famous ‘Plum Pudding Riots’ in Canterbury, on Christmas Day 1647.  It prompted the people of Kent to rebel against the Christmas ban, which they saw as the imposition of the beliefs of a small minority of Presbyterian MPs in parliament.

The Plum Pudding Riots in Canterbury at Christmas 1647 signalled widespread anger with Parliament.  Many who had objected to the King as a despot now believed that Parliament was no better.  Two such men were former soldiers Colonel ‘Freeborn John’ Lilburne and Major John Wildman.  Both had been convinced Puritans who had fought for greater freedom against the King. They now believed, as Levellers, that parliament would continue to impose the beliefs of a small minority until it was elected on a democratic basis.

On Sunday 23rd January 1648, just a month after the Plum Pudding Riots in Canterbury,  the Leveller leaders, Lilburne and Wildman called the people of Kent to come to Dartford to sign their petition, ‘An Agreement of the People.’ This advocated votes for all men, which would safeguard the people from a minority elite, who sought to impose their beliefs on the people of England.

However, for the majority of the people of Kent, Leveller’s radical proposals promised only more conflict and war. A clear majority favoured a return to the status quo, with parliament making peace with the King and a disbandment of the New Model Army to bring down the burden of taxation.  The people of Kent, angered by the cancellation of Christmas now prepared to march on Parliament with a petition of their own.

The rebellion in Kent was not an isolated one.  Rebellion broke out in Wales and Essex, as people rose up against the draconian use of power by parliament.  Charles I sought to capitalize on these religious and political divisions. While imprisoned on the Isle of Wight in 1647-48, the king managed to conclude a peace treaty with the Scots and marshal Royalist sentiment and discontent with Parliament into a series of armed uprisings across England in the spring and summer of 1648.  These uprisings would become known as the Second English Civil War.

On 30th May 1648,  General Fairfax’s New Model Army forced the Kentish rebels to abandon taking their petition to Westminster by forcing them to retreat from their Blackheath rendez-vous.  On the 31st May 1648, Fairfax mustered his forces by William Draper’s May Place House, on what was then called Crayford Heath.  What followed was a skirmish at Stonebridge, Northfleet, before a climatic battle at Maidstone on June 1st, 1648 that brought a defeat to the Kentish Royalists.  Defeats for the Royalist rebels at Colchester and Preston (Scots) brought a swift end to the Second Civil War.

After the crushing victory of the New Model Army hard-line opponents of the king took charge.  All opposition in Westminster was crushed by what was known as ‘Prides Purge’ in December 1648.  This army coup left only a small ‘Rump Parliament’ of like-minded Presbyterian MPs to rule the nation.   Concluding that peace could not be reached while Charles was still alive, the Rump set up a high court and put the king on trial for treason. Charles was found guilty and executed by beheading on January 30, 1649, at Whitehall.

Third English Civil War (1649-51)

With Charles dead, Oliver Cromwell ruled supreme in England, backed by the military might of the New Model Army. Like elsewhere in England the aftermath of the Civil War and the King’s execution made its impact on Crayford. Parliament flexed its muscles and imposed Puritan rectors Thomas Thorowgood and David Clarkson on the parish.  The legacy of those years remains to this day with the words on the St Paulinus rector board: ‘And Others intruded by Parliament.’

In 1649, Cromwell led his army to victory in Ireland, including the infamous massacre of thousands of Irish Royalists at Drogheda. Meanwhile, Scotland came to an agreement with the executed king’s eldest son, also named Charles, who was crowned King Charles II of Scotland in early 1651.

Even before he was officially crowned, Charles II had formed an army of English and Scottish Royalists, prompting Cromwell to invade Scotland in 1650. After losing the Battle of Dunbar to Cromwell’s forces in September 1650, Charles led an invasion of England the following year, only to suffer another defeat against a huge Parliamentarian army at Worcester. The young king narrowly escaped capture by hiding in an oak tree, but the decisive victory ended the Third English Civil War, along with the larger War of the Three Kingdoms (England, Scotland and Ireland).

Impact of the Civil Wars

An estimated 200,000 English soldiers and civilians were killed during the three civil wars, by fighting and the disease spread by armies; the loss was greater population-wise, than what is popularly believed to be this nation’s bloodiest conflict, World War One.

After Cromwell’s death in 1658, he was succeeded briefly by his son Richard, who abdicated just eight months later. With the continued disintegration of the republic, the larger Parliament was reassembled, and the New Model Army commander General George Monck led negotiations with Charles II to resume the throne. In May 1660, Charles II was restored to the throne.  He was met on his return to England by the New Model Army under Monck at Dartford Heath.  he was then escorted through Crayford so that he could return in triumph to London. On St George’s Day 1661, he was crowned King Charles II at Westminster Abbey.