ABSTRACT
For three years and eight months after Charles raised his standard at Nottingham, England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales were engaged in the first of a series of civil wars. For Charles this was a time of great strain and involvement. He worked very diligently on state papers, trying to oversee the war; yet he left the all-important strategic and administrative details to others. He rode long and hard, relishing the rigours of the campaign as much as he had the pleasure of the chase. The war broke up his family. For much of it his wife was abroad, trying to raise the men and material that he needed almost as desperately as he missed her. For months he was away from his children, or had to try and bring them up in Oxford, which was no longer a university town of dreaming spires, but an overcrowded, bawdy city under siege. Yet there were compensations. Charles enjoyed the soldier’s life, with its directness, its simple answers, its comradeship. Moments, such as the picnic lunch at Lostwithiel with his front-line troops, just before his greatest personal victory, gave him a sense of belonging that only those who have loved soldering can fully appreciate, and those who have known the full depths of loneliness can completely savour.
