ABSTRACT
The middle years of the seventeenth century witnessed the greatest concentration of armed violence in the recorded history of Britain and Ireland. More men died of wounds during the 1640s in these islands than in any other decade in our history, and one-third to a quarter of those between the ages of 16 and 60 were in arms for part or all of the time, whereas most of the major towns were garrisoned and a substantial proportion besieged. 1 For those of us who live in England and Wales, the central image is of epic battles between the Cavaliers, the supporters of King Charles I, and the Roundheads, who followed Oliver Cromwell. However, bitter internecine warfare rarely emerges out of nothing, and the First Civil War of 1642 2 to 1646, which ended in the comprehensive triumph of the king’s enemies, was no exception. It was the second of three stages in the disintegration of the traditional political institutions of England and Wales and of the social control based on land ownership that underpinned them. The first stage was military defeat by the Scots in 1640 in the so-called Bishops’ War and its constitutional aftermath, which are described briefly later in this chapter; the last the revolution of 1647, when ultimate power passed into the hands of the victorious Roundhead army. But that was not the end of the fighting. Associated with the bedding in of the revolution was a revival of internal conflict in England and Wales. This has always been seen as a second civil war. However, it was more than a civil war. Without the very strong prospect of a Scottish invasion, it is unlikely that Charles’s English and Welsh supporters would have taken up arms on his behalf.
