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. While all wars are confused affairs, civil wars are especially chaotic, and that which afflicted the British Isles during the 1640s more than most. In retrospect it may be possible to make sense of this labyrinthine conflict without doing too much harm to the chaos that is reality. Parliament rejected it out of hand on the grounds that they could not treat with the king so long as he proclaimed them traitors. By and large the loyalty of the moderates to the king’s cause was based on the conviction that by the end of 1641 the Long Parliament had gone too far, and that during a crisis, such as the Irish revolt, a subject’s duty was to his sovereign.
