ABSTRACT
During the fall and winter of 1642-3, the English protagonists divided their nation into military regions as their garrisons and field forces proliferated. In Scotland the Covenanters faced a growing royalist party seeking to overturn the Scottish revolutionary settlement. Additionally, the Covenanters saw the possibility of affecting the outcome of the English war by political and perhaps military intervention, hoping that their entrance into that struggle would leave a victorious English parliament in their debt. In this way the Scots could possibly achieve religious uniformity in Britain. For the Irish Confederates, the continuation of the English Civil War meant that neither the royalists nor the Westminster government could send sufficient military resources to crush their insurrection. Thus, Irish Catholics had a reasonable chance of achieving political autonomy or of driving the English and Scottish forces out of Ireland.
