ABSTRACT
The king surrendered, fled his Oxford headquarters, and instructed the commanders of his remaining garrisons to throw in the sponge. The next 18 months would witness intense struggles in Westminster, Edinburgh, Kilkenny and Dublin that would effect political upheavals in all three kingdoms and culminate in the outbreak of renewed warfare among a profoundly altered constellation of forces. At Westminster the myriad items of unfinished business jostling for attention, as well as Charles's reluctance to recognize that his defeat on the battlefield required substantive concessions at the bargaining table, soon eclipsed any triumphalism over the ending of the war. The Scot's estrangement from the English parliament was compounded by the latter's resolute Erastianism the policy of subordinating the Church to secular political authority. When the Scottish polemicist David Buchanan berated parliament for reneging on its commitment to closer union, the Commons ordered his pamphlet burnt by the common hangman.
