ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the development and nature of parliamentarian tyranny. It also examines the complexity and imbalance of the machinery created to fight the war. It concerns itself with the outrages committed to custom, tradition and the common law; also with the battle between national and local priorities, and with the continuing vitality of provincialism. The King's advisers quickly realised that the Privy Council was ill-suited to wartime conditions, and they established a Council of War in which the King's leading civil servants and military commanders sat side by side, a Council which possessed overall military, logistic and fiscal responsibilities. The structures of war not only put military effectiveness about civil liberties; they also put the population at large at the mercy of men desperately trying to fund a war that cost perhaps ten times as much in real terms as any war that England had ever experienced.
