ABSTRACT
The royalist forces that precipitated the Second Civil War of 1648 comprised a loose coalition with similar interests. Disgruntled former parliamentarians such as Major-General Rowland Powell and Colonels John Poyer and Rice Powell in Wales came to view their interests as best satisfied by the royalists. In Kent and Essex, the scene of anti-Parliament disturbances, political Presbyterians, who despised the committees and the seemingly arbitrary drift of the Independent-dominated Parliament, viewed the best hope for peace and a settlement as the constitutionally restrained monarchy of 1641. Former royalist commanders, such as Langdale, Goring, Byron, Lucas and Glenham, looked for an opportunity to overturn the military defeat of 1646. In Scotland, aristocrats known as the Engagers concluded a treaty with Charles for his restoration that drew upon Scottish anger and disillusionment with English failure to honour the terms of the 1643 Covenant treaty. In separate regions, each of these parties raised the royal standard and attempted to rally conservatives and moderates who opposed the Independents and the New Model Army. Cromwell called the Second Civil War, and the further blood-letting caused by the king’s plotting and the subsequent Scottish invasion, ‘a more prodigious Treason than any that had been perpetrated before’. 1
