The English Revolution as a civil war* John Morrill University of Cambridge The 2017 Historical Research/Wiley lecture was designed to raise some general issues about the nature of ‘civil wars’ as a prelude to a conference that looked at many examples across time and space. It takes the events of the sixteen-forties across Britain and Ireland and notes that very few participants accepted (at least publicly) that they were engaged in one or more civil wars. There was widespread seventeenth-century understanding that the term ‘civil war’ (bellum civile) had been developed in late republican and early imperial Rome but as just one of several terms used to analyse and describe internal wars and conflicts. This article explores the implications of this for our understanding of the first great crisis of the Stuart kingdoms. I was delighted to accept the invitation to give the Historical Research/Wiley Lecture for 2017 but I was startled and challenged to be provided with my title. As the prelude to a conference which was to consider civil wars in many times and places, it made sense for me to be given a specific task. But ‘The English Revolution as a civil war’ turns out to consist of seven words, six of which are treacherous. The word ‘English’ is perhaps the most treacherous word of all, since whatever else the blood-letting of the sixteen-forties and early sixteen-fifties was about it was not localized to ‘England’. The word ‘Revolution’ carries so much baggage and is weighed down by so much anachronism that I have avoided it for much of my career.1 ‘As’ is a curious preposition assuming that the Revolution (if there was one) happened in parallel with a civil war (if there was one). English civil wars (if there were any) ended in 1648. The Revolution, in so far as it is a term still deployed, focuses on the events of 1649 and after. The word ‘a’ presumes a single civil war rather than an interlocking series of wars across two decades and three kingdoms. The word ‘civil’ nowadays does not evoke the Latin word ‘civis’ (citizen) as once it did, and its resonances are more of a civil rather than an uncivil conflict, a civilized rather than an uncivilized war, an idea that goes back to Augustine’s City of God where he speaks of ‘discordiae civiles vel potius inciviles’.2 * This article is a revised version of the text of the Historical Research/Wiley lecture delivered on 17 Jan. 2017 to launch the Institute of Historical Research’s Winter Conference on civil wars. I am grateful to all those who asked such good questions in the discussion that followed, several of whom made me rethink what I said on that occasion; and to my friends Colin David and David Sacks for their encouragement and admirably clear and firm advice about some slackness in my thinking. 1 A search on the Bibliography of British and Irish History (<http://www.brepolis.net/> [accessed 31 July 2017]), with ‘Revolution’ as a title word and 1640–60 as time delimiters produces (in July 2017) 1,137 hits, so it is still used vicariously by historians. One recent important reflection that covers the key historiography is D. Como, ‘God’s revolutions: England, Europe and the concept in the mid seventeenth century’, in Scripting Revolution: a Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. K. M. Baker and D. Edelstein (Stanford, Calif., 2015). 2 I owe this quotation to D. Armitage, ‘Every great revolution is a civil war’, in Baker and Edelstein, pp. 57–68, 269–71, at p. 64 (the source is St. Augustine, City of God, bk. 19, para. 7). C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V DOI: 10.1111/1468-2281.12200 Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 Abstract The English Revolution as a civil war 727 3 What follows is based on an online full-title search of the English Short Title Catalogue <http://estc.bl.uk> and a search of the scanned and searchable full text (now very considerable) of Early English Books Online <https:// eebo.chadwyck.com/home> [both accessed 1 Aug. 2017]. 4 Based on Armitage, ‘Every great revolution’ and J. Osgood, ‘Ending civil war at Rome: rhetoric and reality, 88 B.C.E.2197 C.E.’, American Hist. Rev. cxx (2015), 1683–95. Since this lecture was delivered, there has appeared D. Armitage, Civil Wars: a History in Ideas (2017). I have added some references from that book but I would obviously have made greater use of it if I had read it before writing the lecture of which this is a fairly faithful record. 5 A briefe declaration of all the civill wars that have happened in England (1643) (E.S.T.C., no. R20216 (E.S.T.C. numbers will be used for all 17th-century printings cited in this article)). For a discussion of English 17th-century histories of civil wars in ancient Rome and medieval England, see Armitage, Civil Wars, pp. 101–3. 6 H.P., The manifold miseries of civill warre (1642) (E.S.T.C., no. R233495). H.P. has usually been assumed to be Henry Parker, but Michael Mendle has given good reasons for being sceptical about this attribution and suggests instead Henry Peachum (see M. Mendle, Henry Parker and the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1995), p. 195). 7 Humphrey Crouch, A godly exhortation to this distressed nation shewing the true cause of this unnatural civill war amongst us (1642) (E.S.T.C., no. R212540). 8 John Corbet, An historicall narration of the military government of Gloucester (1645) (E.S.T.C., no. R23152). Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 As we will see, some of the civil wars of the sixteen-forties were a lot more civilized than others. And finally ‘war’. When does a rebellion morph into a war? If the title index of Early English Books Online is anything to go by, those living through the violence of the sixteen-forties and sixteen-fifties were seven times more likely to call what they were living through rebellion than civil war. Indeed the Long Parliament entirely avoided calling it either a rebellion or a civil war and preferred ‘troubles’. It seems that I had been told to traverse quicksand. At least we know what those living through what they did indeed sometimes call ‘civil war’ meant when they used the term.3 Most educated Britons in the mid seventeenth century knew their Cicero and most of them also knew their Tacitus, their Lucan and their Plutarch. Cicero indeed seems to have been the one to invent the term bellum civile in de Officiis and in the form pestifera bella civilia (accursed wars amongst citizens) and Roman historians came to identify five periods of intense bella civilia between the Sullan wars of the eighties B.C. and the Severan wars of the one-nineties A.D.4 So when seventeenth-century Englishmen came to conceptualize their own history, there is no doubt that Roman accounts of Roman civil wars were very much in their minds. They were also acutely aware that theirs was not the first civil war in English history, or in the history of their own times. So an anonymous eight-page pamphlet in 1643 gave itself the title, A briefe declaration of all the civill wars that have happened in England, first in the raigne of King John; secondly in the Barrons wars; thirdly in Yorke and Lancaster Warrs, and the author then itemized civil wars in the reigns of Henry VIII and each of his three children.5 In contrast, H.P. (perhaps Henry Parker) had already described and analysed The manifold miseries of civill warre and discord in a kingdome by the example of Germany, France, Ireland and other places.6 The first time the term was applied to England seems to have been by Humphrey Crouch, in a broadsheet ballad received by Thomason on 9 November 1642, entitled A godly exhortation to this distressed nation shewing the true cause of this unnatural civill war amongst us.7 And by 1645 the notion of an English civil war was well established as in John Corbet’s An historicall narration of the military government of Gloucester, from the beginning of the Civill Warre between Kinge and Parliament, to the removal of Colonell Massie from that government.8 However, by not later than 1644 the term was also being applied to much more complex interacting conflicts in the three kingdoms of the house of Stuart. Thus one anonymous author wrote A discourse concerning the grounds & causes of this miserable civill war wherein Ireland is 728 The English Revolution as a civil war If there were Irish who resorted to war to make Ireland a sovereign kingdom under the Stuart or any other crown, and the Irish or English or Scots who fought to keep it subject, still this would be bellum sociale as the term is being used here.14 At the centre of my argument there remains the War of the Three Kingdoms as a great bellum sociale.15 I will return to this in due course. And I shall point out that there was at least one kind of internal war within the Roman system which is not covered by the accounts offered by David Armitage or Pocock. This is the war of secession, where those fully incorporated as Roman socii but only in individual cases as cives Romani fought to disown identifies to which they were bound by conquest and experience and to cease to be socii and in some cases cives. The most obvious and bloody such war of independence was the Jewish Revolt of 66–70 A.D.16 Were the wars in Ireland in the sixteen-forties more 9 Anon., A discourse concerning the grounds and causes of this miserable civill war (n.d. but 1644) (E.S.T.C., no. R15277). 10 Armitage. ‘Every great revolution’, p. 64. 11 Armitage. ‘Every great revolution’, pp. 64–6, citing St. Augustine, City of God, bk. 3, para. 23. 12 St. Augustine, City of God, bk. 3, para. 23 (and see also bk. 9, para. 4). Augustine uses the terms bellum civile/ bella civilia 34 times in The City of God. The concept of bellum sociale is discussed by Armitage, Civil Wars (e.g., pp. 34, 130–8) but he at no time relates to the events in Britain in the 1640s, repeatedly referring to the English civil wars and making no reference to Scotland and Ireland (although note the telling comment on p.101: ‘after the British constitutional crisis of 1640–1 broke out into armed arrays across England . . .’ (author’s emphasis)). 13 J. Pocock, ‘The Atlantic archipelago and the War of the Three Kingdoms’, in The British Problem c.1534–1707: State Formation in the Atlantic Archipelago, ed. B. Bradshaw and J. Morrill (Basingstoke, 1996), pp. 172–91, at p. 186. 14 Pocock, ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, p. 189. 15 Pocock, ‘Atlantic Archipelago’, p. 190. 16 Many of those engaged in the wars would have known about the Jewish war of independence: an English translation of Josephus’s Wars of the Jews had been published in seven separate printings between 1602 and 1640 (two of them in 1640 itself (E.S.T.C., nos. S106535 and S112706)), as part of the Famous and Memorable Works of Josephus. There is a modern edition with an exemplary introduction that covers the points relevant here (Josephus Flavius, Wars of the Jews (Oxford, 2017)). For a full account, see S. Mason, A History of the Jewish War: AD 66–74 (Cambridge, 2016). C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 exhausted, England wasted and Scotland likely to be embroiled and wherein not only liberty but religion is endangered.9 Now this is an author who creates an agenda for us. And what were the characteristics of a civil war identified by and remembered from the Roman historians and poets? Trumpets were sounded, standards were the visible sign, conventional forms of warfare were the means, and control of the City of Rome was the aim. Civil wars were not spasmodic expressions of political violence. Civil wars were sequential and cumulative across all or most of the territories of the Republic or Empire.10 And the violence was always more terrible than in foreign war and the wounds took much longer to heal. Those evils were more infernal because internal, wrote Augustine.11 And yet the Romans did not describe every internal war as a bellum civile. They also had concepts of bella servilia (slave revolts) and most interestingly bella socialia. How much Roman blood was shed and how much of Italy was destroyed and devastated, lamented Augustine, in ‘bella socialia, bella servilia et bella civilia’.12 But here, as John Pocock pointed out, bellum sociale does not translate as a ‘social war’, an insurrection to overturn the social order, but a bellum inter socios: ‘a war amongst socii, polities associated in a system comprising a multiplicity of states. [Each] great bellum sociale of antiquity turned on the eligibility of Italian socii to be treated as cives Romani’.13 The immediate relevance to events in Scotland and Ireland should be apparent, and indeed he spelt it out: The English Revolution as a civil war 729 17 See below. For the most recent scholarship on this, see M. Hicks. The Wars of the Roses (2012). 19 The classic account is C. Wilson, Elizabeth I and the Netherlands (1970). 20 The interactions are economically and effectively chronicled in J. Elliott, Europe Divided 1559–98 (1968). 21 M. Stoyle, Soldiers and Strangers: an Ethnic History of the English Civil War (2005), esp. ch. 5, and the list of all known Continental officers in the appendix at pp. 213–23. Note his comment (at p. 95), ‘no one will ever be able to say precisely how many foreign professional soldiers there were in England between 1642 and 1646’. For another aspect, see P. Edwards, Dealing in Death: the Arms Trade and the British Civil Wars (Stroud, 2000). 22  Siochr M. O u, ‘The duke of Lorraine and the international struggle for Ireland, 1649–52’, Historical Jour., xlviii (2005), 905–32. 23 For our purposes, the following is an excellent summary of a great body of scholarship by the following  hAnnrachain, ‘Rinuccini, Giovanni Battista (1592–1653)’, O.D.N.B. (Oxford, 2004) <http://www. author: T. O oxforddnb.com/view/article/23660> [accessed 27 July 2017]. See more broadly, J. Ohlmeyer, ‘Ireland independent: Confederate foreign policy and international relations during the mid 17th century’, in Ireland: from Independence to Occupation, ed. J. Ohlmeyer (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 89–111. 18 Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 wars of independence than wars to redefine the Irish relationship to the British and Irish Crown, and indeed more too than a classic civil war?17 There is one more preliminary problem of definition to be addressed before I get stuck into a more empirical discussion of what actually happened in the English Revolution. It is characteristic of civil wars across medieval and modern history that foreign governments intervene and interfere. The Wars of the Roses only lasted as long as they did, and the outcomes were only what they were, because the rulers of France, Brittany and Burgundy were willing to provide men, munitions and other forms of protection and succour to those most recently driven into exile.18 The Wars of Religion in the second half of the sixteenth century were viewed by some, not least by Queen Elizabeth I herself, as a series of discreet civil wars, and she was reluctant to set precedents by, as she put it, setting fires in other men’s houses. But for many, including her own leading counsellors, it was one big war, part of a global struggle of Christ and Antichrist, a struggle of good and evil, with the pope, to coin a phrase, as the axis of evil.19 Thus Spain, France and England all interfered militarily in one another’s internal wars.20 We all speak readily enough, guided by experts on television, of the current Syrian civil war. It is hard to believe things would be as they are if outside powers had kept out of it. How helpful is to speak of the Vietnamese civil war of the nineteen-sixties? Now in that sobering context at least we can say that the English Revolution of the sixteen-forties contained within it a civil war or series of civil wars that were not particularly complicated by foreign intervention. Mercenaries from the Continent had a small part to play, but as independent operators, not as agents of foreign powers.21 Charles II may have granted extraordinary powers to Charles Duke of Lorraine as Protector Royal of Ireland to bring a large army to ‘liberate’ Ireland from the Cromwellians, but that large army never materialized.22 The Atlantic seaboard powers may have given support to exiles, made grants or loans to the Crown or to its opponents and interfered diplomatically, most obviously the French in Scotland and the hugely unhelpful papal nunciature in Ireland of GionBattista Rinuccini,23 but none of this can be said to have determined any of the outcomes to any significant extent. False hope of foreign aid was probably more important than feet on the ground or cash in the pocket but the results were strictly secondary. So the conflicts in England in the sixteenforties can be firmly called internal wars, with trumpets, standards, seven of the ten biggest recorded battles in English history, advanced siegecraft, massacre and retribution by due process. What we now need to disentangle is the extent to which the conflict was straightforwardly bellum civile, a civil war. 730 The English Revolution as a civil war No necessity shall ever, I hope, drive Me or Mine to invade or sell the Priests Lands, which both Pharaoh’s divinity, and Ioseph’s true piety abhorred to doe: So unjust I think it both in the eye of Reason and Religion, to deprive the most sacred employment of all due incouragements; and like that other hardhearted Pharaoh, to withdraw the Straw, and encrease the Taske; so pursuing the 24 J. S. Morrill, The Revolt of the Provinces 1630–50 (Harlow, 1976) (rev. edn. Revolt in the Provinces 1634–48 (Harlow, 2000)), ch. 3; cf. D. Underdown, ‘The chalk and the cheese: contrasts among the English Clubmen’, Past & Present, lxxxv (1979), 25–48. For a review of all the literature and a penetrating account of the ‘peaceable movements’ in south Wales, see T. Gray, ‘Clubmen and peaceable armies, the political culture of south Wales, c.1642–54’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 2017). 25 Stoyle, pp. 138–42, 163–5. 26 J. Morrill, ‘The British Revolution in the English provinces, 1640–9’, forthcoming (originally delivered as the March Fitch Lecture at the I.H.R. in 2009). 27 An exact collection of all remonstrances . . . printed for Edward Husbands (1642 [1643]) (E.S.T.C., no. R8395) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 Using the Roman definitions there was a civil war in England in the sixteen-forties. Trumpets sounded, banners were unfurled, there were armies with fully recognized command structures on both sides and there were combatants on both sides from each of the forty English and twelve Welsh counties. It is perhaps worth stressing that there were just two sides. Although over forty years ago I drew attention to the Clubmen movements, that is, to those who organized to drive both royalist and parliamentarian sides out of their county or region, I never claimed that they were a third movement. They simply wanted the civil war to be fought elsewhere in England and the many studies of the Clubmen since then have established that in practice almost all the movements made deals with one or both sides and in due course became irregular royalists or irregular parliamentarians. And they melted away like spring snow after a short time.24 More generally, what I would now say is that within royalist and parliamentarian parties in most counties there were many who saw their civil war as a war for control of their own boundaries and who saw little commitment to assisting in a national struggle. But equally there were those who were only too happy to share local resources to secure a national victory. Cheshire, which I studied in the nineteen-sixties, remains an excellent case in point, but Suffolk, Glamorgan and Kent would be equally good examples. Both sides introduced conscription, and combined organized tax collection. Both sides implemented highly controlled and widespread confiscation of the lands and moveable goods of those of their opponents deemed to be free political agents. Both sides had national ‘marching’ armies as well as regional armies expected not only to secure anything up to eight counties but to contribute to campaigns elsewhere. The core of the royalist infantry at Naseby had been raised in south Wales for example.25 Not all counties contributed equally to national campaigns. For example, very few parliamentarian troops raised in south Wales ever fought outside south Wales, but in practice men and money were mobilized in a way that allows us to speak of a national war and not of a series of regional conflicts. 26 Did that mean that Charles I or the leaders in parliament thought they were fighting a civil war? I have already noted that they resisted using the term in their official pronouncements. The formal papers exchanged between them and gathered together in a 900-page collection does not use the word once, the king always opting for ‘rebellion’ and parliament for endless circumlocutions and evasions.27 Just as striking, the king only used the term civil war once in the whole of the 248-page Eikon Basilike and in a rather constrained sense: The English Revolution as a civil war 731 oppressed Church, as some have done, to the red sea of a Civill Warre, where nothing but a miracle can save either It, or Him, who esteems it His greatest Title to be called, and His chiefest glory to be The Defender of the Church.28 28 [Charles I ventriloquized by John Gauden], Eikon Basilike (1648 [1649]), pp. 106–7 (E.S.T.C., no. R505040) (author’s emphasis). 29 J. Morrill, ‘Rhetoric and action: Charles I, tyranny, and the English Revolution’, repr. and most accessible in J. Morrill, The Nature of the English Revolution (Harlow, 1990), pp. 285–306. 30 This is a point I have made on perhaps too many occasions, most fully in ‘Three kingdoms and one commonwealth? The enigma of mid-17th-century Britain and Ireland’, in Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History, ed. A. Grant and K. Stringer (1995), pp. 170–92. For the emergence of ‘dynastic agglomerates’ in early modern Europe and specifically in Britain, see J. Morrill and R. von Friedeburg, Monarchy Transformed: Princes and their Elites in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2017), esp. chs. 1–2. 31 J. Morrill, ‘The national Covenant in its British context’, in The Scottish National Covenant in its British Context, 1638–51, ed. J. Morrill (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 1–30; P. Donald, An Uncounselled King: Charles I and the Scottish Troubles, 1637–41 (Cambridge, 1990), chs. 3–5. The most powerful recent re-presentation of the Scottish crisis, with a most important emphasis on how ‘interactions between print, manuscripts and political performance created spaces in which open and relatively free debate could take place’, is L. Stewart’s Rethinking the Scottish Revolution: Covenanted Scotland, 1637–51 (Oxford, 2016), chs. 1–3, quote at p. 30. Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 This is a very oblique application of the term. I suggested thirty years ago that parliament stopped publicly accusing Charles I of acts of tyranny for much of the autumn of 1641 onwards because of the difficulties it would get them into – they had been arguing against papal monarchomach theory for two generations and knew all the arguments.29 From their private papers, it is clear that privately they still thought of him as tyrant but it suited them to avoid saying so in the House or in print. So it may well have suited the purposes of both sides to avoid using the term ‘civil war’. In preparing this article I focused on printed material and can only offer a generalized opinion on what would be found in the diaries and private letters of principal actors in the conflict. That said, my impression is that the term was used in private but, importantly, usually in the form of a lamentation. A civil war was what we have, they said, and it is a disaster, as Augustine and Lucan and Cicero have taught us. It was never seen as a means to an end but as a catastrophic failure of policy and entirely the fault, each would say, of the other side. Moderates on both sides saw it as a scourge from God for their failure of duty. There is a sharp difference, however, between the king himself and parliament institutionally in how they instead conceptualized the conflict in which they were engaged. Charles always saw it as a series of interlocking conflicts across his dominions, across his dynastic agglomerate.30 In 1638, the Scottish National Covenant was not a call to arms. It was an act of defiance, a general strike by the Scottish nation against the king’s attempts to impose a prayer book and much else on them, an enforced anglicanization of their religious life and practice. Charles did not have the resources, legal, political or military, within Scotland to enforce his will. But what the Scots had not anticipated was that he would use the resources of all three of his kingdoms to crush their passive defiance. He planned risings by supporters in the north of Scotland, and the despatch of armies from England and Ireland, to break the will of the Covenanters. It all went pear-shaped, of course, both in the summer of 1639 and in the summer of 1640. But he was not deterred.31 Throughout the period of the first civil war in England, 1642–6, he was negotiating with the Irish Confederates first to free up the English army in Ireland to return to the English theatre and then to bring over a large Irish Catholic army to rescue his evaporating fortunes. In order to get this army, he was willing to 732 The English Revolution as a civil war To what extent did Englishmen who lived away from the centre of power believe that they were engaged in a purely English civil war? The vast majority of those supporting parliament, as well as many of those trying to avoid being drawn into the conflict and most royalists who sought to get their sequestered property back after the fighting was over, took the Solemn League and Covenant in or after the winter of 1643/4. And they 32 J. Lowe, ‘Charles I and the confederation of Kilkenny 1643–9’, Irish Hist. Studies, xiv (1964–5), 1–19; J. Lowe. ‘The Glamorgan mission of 1645–6’, Studia Hibernica, iv (1964), 155–96. 33 E. Cowan, Montrose: for Covenant and King (1977). 34 D. Stevenson, Alisdair Maccolla and the Highland Problem in the 17th Century (Edinburgh, 1980) (new edn. as Highland Warrior: Alasdair MacColla and the Civil Wars (Edinburgh, 2014)), esp. ch. 1. 35 Morrill, ‘Three kingdoms’, pp. 179–85. 36 J. Morrill, ‘The rule of saints and soldiers: the wars of religion in Britain and Ireland, 1638–60’, in A Short History of the British Isles: the 17th Century, ed. J. Wormald (Oxford, 2008), ch. 3 (see esp. pp. 84–9, 92–103). 37 J. Morrill, ‘The English Revolution in British and Irish Context’, in The Oxford Handbook of the English Revolution, ed. M. J. Braddick (Oxford, 2015), pp. 555–7. C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 create an effectively free-standing Irish Catholic monarchy.32 And when his English enemies made an alliance with the Scots, he found enough supporters in Scotland who resisted and resented the Calvinist theocracy that was being set up there to begin a civil war in Scotland to weaken Scottish participation in the war in England.33 And those Scottish loyalists came to rely very heavily on Irish Catholic allies crossing the narrow seas from Ulster.34 The king may well have thought that in England he faced a rebellion that could only be put down with loyal support from across his kingdoms. Civil war was not necessary to his understanding of his predicament. Charles’s English opponents gathered in and around parliament were, unsurprisingly, more divided in their views of the nature of the conflict. Once armed conflict broke out in England, they effectively abandoned committing any resources to the defence of the English and Protestant interest in Ireland, and at no point before 1648 did they consider involving themselves in the internal wars in Scotland. And at no point did a majority of them want to do more than pay a minimum religious and constitutional bounty to gain Scottish military assistance to secure victory in England.35 If this meant signing up to a common religious settlement across the three kingdoms, it was for most of them a price worth paying. In 1641, 1643–6, 1648 and, indeed, 1652 they only conceded in the vaguest of terms the federal structure that the Scots were determined to achieve.36 When in early January 1649 the English parliament decided to put King Charles on trial for treason against his English subjects, they did not consult with or even inform the Scottish parliament, and when the London-based Scottish commissioners of that parliament wrote three times to the Rump demanding an explanation, the latter voted not to open the commissioners’ letters. And when on 2 February 1649 the English parliament declared that monarchy was to be abolished in England and Ireland, they passed over Scotland in silence. In their unanimous view the Anglo-Scottish union of 1603–4 had been dissolved and it was assumed that the Scots would resume an independent existence. It is important that the Scots’ immediate response, on 5 February, was to proclaim Charles II not as king of Scotland but as king of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Scots fought in the sixteen-fifties not for independence but for federal integration with England. Which all goes to show that the king certainly believed he was engaged in a war in and between the three kingdoms while the English parliament tried to focus on fighting an English civil war conscious that events in Scotland and Ireland had to be recognized and their impact minimized.37 The English Revolution as a civil war 733 38 See S. R. Gardiner, Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution 1625–60 (Oxford, 3rd edn., 1904); the Solemn League and Covenant available online at The Constitution Society <http://www.constitution.org/eng/ conpur058.htm> [accessed 3 Aug. 2017]: ‘We noblemen, barons, knights, gentlemen, citizens, burgesses, ministers of the Gospel, and commons of all sorts in the kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland, by the providence of God living under one King . . . do swear that . . . we shall endeavour to bring the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion, confession of faith, form of Church government, directory for worship and catechising, that we, and our posterity after us, may, as brethren, live in faith and love’. 39 Stoyle, ch. 4. 40 Stoyle, pp. 74–5. 41 Stoyle suggests that about 1,970 Irishmen crossed over to fight in England during the war of 1642–6, all led by Protestant officers, mainly from Munster. 42 ‘October 1644: An Ordinance Commanding that no Officer or Soldier either by Sea or Land, shall give any Quarter to any Irishman, or to any papist born in Ireland, which shall be taken in Arms against the Parliament in England’, in Acts and Ordinances of the Interregnum, 1642–60, ed. C. H. Firth and R. S. Rait (1911), pp. 554–5 (British History Online <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/no-series/acts-ordinances-interregnum/pp554-555> [accessed 12 Jan. 2017]). Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 would have been in no doubt that this not only required them to sign up to a new federated monarchy and a new pan-Britannic evangelical Protestant Church, but also to a joint Anglo-Scottish conquest of Catholic Ireland.38 But the lived reality of a threekingdom conflict varied enormously from region to region. In essence, it meant a great deal more to those living north of the line of the Severn and the Trent than those living south of it. Anyone within 100 miles of the English/Scottish border experienced a Scottish presence for three years, and large numbers of Scottish troops were engaged in the sieges of Newark – 214 miles south of the Tweed, closer to Brighton than to Berwick – as well as in Lancashire (and briefly as far south as the siege of Hereford). The Scots were the biggest component of the army that faced the king at the largest battle of the wars, at Marston Moor in July 1644 outside York. The only Scots men and soldiers who would have been seen in southern England were a few officers returning from wars on the Continent and offering their services mainly but not exclusively to the parliamentarian armies.39 They were not welcome. To take an early and over-the-top example from a private letter from a royalist captain: his men kept themselves warm in inclement weather, he said, ‘with the hopes of rubbing, fubbing and scrubbing those scurvy, filthy, nasty, lousy, itchy, scabby, shitten, stinking, slovenly, snotty-nosed, logger-headed and [fifteen insults later] long-eared, short-haired, damnable, atheistical, puritanical crew of the Scottish covenant’.40 Similarly, those living in the counties of Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire, the north Wales coastal counties and those living on either side of the Bristol Channel lived in constant royalist hope or deep parliamentarian anxiety that an Irish Catholic army would arrive any day. For such was Charles I’s plan and such was parliament’s worst fear, much touted in its propaganda. Indeed, several thousand troops did arrive from Ireland in and after the late winter of 1643/4. These were for the most part English soldiers sent over in 1642 to protect those Protestants who had survived the massacres of the previous winter.41 They were presented as Irish Catholics, not only in a series of deliberately misleading pamphlets (Trump-like tweets we might call them nowadays), but also in the Long Parliament’s ‘Ordinance forbidding the giving of quarter to any Irishman or Papist born in Ireland who shall be taken in Hostility against the Parliament either upon the Sea or in England and Wales’.42 Many returning English troops died under the terms of this ordinance. To give just two examples: a Cornish major called Connock was misrepresented as an Irishman called Major Connaught and was later 734 The English Revolution as a civil war Of course, there were civil wars in Scotland in the sixteen-forties, first in 1644 and 1645, and then, less certainly in 1649–50. Trumpets sounded, banners unfurled, men and monies were raised across Scotland and there was sustained fighting. Montrose’s campaign would never have got off the ground without the Macdonnell/Maccolla forces from Ireland, but whatever else it was, it was a civil war.49 The war between the Resolutioners and the Remonstrants or Protesters in and after 1649 was more spasmodic 43 Morrill, ‘The English Revolution in British and Irish context’, pp. 568–72. Stoyle, p. 68 (for a wider discussion of the treatment of the Irish, see pp. 65–71). 45 The Letter Books of Sir William Brereton, ed. R. N. Dore (2 vols., Gloucester, 1984–90); The Civil War in Staffordshire in the Spring of 1646: Sir William Brereton’s Letter Book, Apr.–May 1646, ed. I. Carr and I. Atherton (Stafford, 2007). 46 The Letter Books of Sir Samuel Luke, 1644–5, Parliamentary Governor of Newport Pagnell, ed. H. G. Tibbutt (Bedfordshire Hist. Rec. Soc., lxii, 1963). 47 R. Howell, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1967); W. Dumble, ‘The Durham Lilburnes and the English Revolution’, in The Last Principality: Politics, Religion and Society in the Bishopric of Durham, 1494–1650, ed. D. Marcombe (Nottingham, 1987), pp. 227–52. 48 [by ‘a Faithful and true well-wisher to the fundamental laws, liberties, and freedoms of the antient free people of England’], A plea at large, for John Lilburn gentleman, now a prisoner in Newgate (1653), p. 4 (E.S.T.C., no. R207176). 49 For which see works cited above, nn. 34 and 35. 44 C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 executed for alleged atrocities committed by him in Cheshire.43 And the summary execution of a supposed Irishman and the display of his hanged body outside the walls of Bolton helped to provoke Prince Rupert’s massacre there.44 None of this applied in the counties across southern England. The edited letter books of Sir William Brereton, parliamentarian general in Cheshire and the north midlands, are full of index entries to Ireland and some to Scotland;45 those of Sir Samuel Luke in Bedfordshire have no references to either.46 The political and religious histories of Newcastle and Sunderland were determined by the presence of the Scots in one but not the other.47 One can write a civil war history of Essex or Dorset or Devon without mentioning Ireland or Scotland. Is it a coincidence that there are no Clubmen movements north of the Severn-Trent line? And is it a coincidence that the Levellers, with their insistent rhetoric of the rights of Englishmen, a settlement for Englishmen, and a squeamishness about speaking of an Irish conquest, were confined to the area south of the Severn and the Trent? None of the Leveller tracts that can be word-searched on Early English Books Online, by the way, contain the phrase ‘civil war’ except for a single reference in A plea at large, for John Lilburn gentleman, now a prisoner in Newgate. Penned for his use and benefit, by a faithful and true well-wisher to the fundamental laws, liberties, and freedoms of the antient free people of England (August 1653), which refers to those slain ‘in the late civil wars’.48 So it mattered a great deal on where you lived in England as to how far you saw the civil war as an English as against a British war. And in so far as the aim of the Scots who did come, and the Catholic Confederates of Ireland who constantly threatened to come, was to change the constitutional relationships of the three kingdoms and to transform the relationship between the peoples of the two islands, it follows that many recognized that this was a bellum sociale as well as a bellum civile. The distinction probably mattered little to the men and women of Kent or Essex. But it mattered a lot to the men of Newark and Newcastle-upon-Tyne or of Cheshire or Devon. The English Revolution as a civil war 735 50 D. Stevenson, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Scotland 1644–51 (1977). The first person to quiz me on this, in characteristically buoyant fashion, was Mark Kishlanky, much missed by me and all who care about the integrity of the discipline of history. 52 By the King, a Proclamation . . . upon occasion of the invasion by the Scots (Oxford, 1643) (E.S.T.C., no. R35096), a single-page broadsheet. 51 Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 and regionally limited, but it was more than a baronial war. The defining difference between the Resolutioners (who were willing to accept Charles II’s claims to contrition for past sins at face value), and the Remonstrants (who were not willing to do so), was on the terms and conditions on which they would not only admit him as their king but also commit themselves to fighting to restore him to all his kingdoms. So this was a Scottish bellum civile as a war but it was a British bellum sociale in its objectives.50 But within the narrow Roman definitions with which we started, it was a civil war. Before we move on from the Anglo-Scots dimension of the English Revolution, there is one more matter to be addressed. Scottish armies crossed the Tweed on five occasions and entered England in 1639, 1640–1, 1643–7 and 1648, and, for twelve months on the second occasion and for four years on the third occasion, they occupied large parts of northern England. Newcastle was under Scottish occupation for a total of sixty-one months. And English armies entered Scotland for three months in 1648 and constituted an army of occupation from 1650 to 1660. Which of these movements was different in kind from a crossing of the Severn or the Trent? Which of them constituted in the minds of actors or observers at the time ‘invasions’?51 Can one part of ‘the Kingdom of Great Britain’ invade another part? If not, then is an ‘invasion’ an act of civil war as we have come to understand it. I have been through all the formal statements made by the king and by the parliaments of England and Scotland and by their executive bodies. As far as I can see, none of them ever acknowledged that they were ‘invading’ their neighbour. From the king’s point of view, he and his father had long promoted the idea that the union of the Crowns created a common identity of his subjects with free movement across his realms. Both parliaments were formally committed, the Scots more than the English, but still both were committed, to a new federal Britain and talk of ‘invasion’ would create all kinds of problems. Great Britain was a legal entity, and while few thought of themselves as only ‘British’ many thought of themselves as British and Scottish or and Welsh or and English. Thus I can find only one reference to ‘invasion’ in official pronouncements until 1648, and sparse ones even after that. The pre-1648 exception is in a single-sheet proclamation of Charles I in December 1643 headed By the King, a Proclamation for the assembling the members of both Houses at Oxford, upon occasion of the invasion by the Scots. And within the proclamation comes an especially startling statement, a call for a ‘union of English hearts to prevent the lasting miseries which this foreign invasion must bring upon this kingdom’.52 I doubt Charles drafted or ever actually saw this proclamation. A whole-work word search on Early English Books Online for ‘invasion’ finds only one other instance of ‘invasion’ in relation to the Scottish military actions before 1648, and it is almost certainly an echo of the king’s proclamation. It comes in a printed letter from Sir Thomas Glemham, the royalist colonel general of Northumberland to the marquess of Argyle. It is dated 20 January 1644 just a month after the royal proclamation. Glemham wrote that ‘without the sight of [your] letter, we could not have bin induced to believe that the Scottish Nation or the prevailing party for the 736 The English Revolution as a civil war 53 A letter from the Marqves of Argile and Sir William Armyn in the name of themselves and their confederates, to Sir Thomas Glemham, dated at Barwicke, January 20: with the answer of Sir Thomas Glemham and the commanders and gentry of Northumberland, dated at Newcastle, January 23 (1644) (E.S.T.C., no. R20037), p. 5. This is at head of his letter, a very pointed statement ahead of the common courtesies of correspondence at the time. 54 A letter from the Marqves of Argile and Sir William Armyn, p. 2. 55 The Scots apostacy, displayed, in a treacherous invasion of the English against the law of nations (1648) (E.S.T.C., no. R205041), p. 1. 56 The declaration of Lieutenant Generall Crumwell concerning the kingdom of Scotland, and their invading the realme of England (1648) (E.S.T.C., no. R205140). 57 The other two that I referred to are Lieut: General Cromwels letter to the honorable William Lenthal Esq; speaker of the honorable House of Commons . . . representing the great damage the kingdom of England hath received from that kingdom by the late invasion (E.S.T.C., no. R205338); and The demands of His Excellency Tho. Lord Fairfax and the Generall Councell of the Army, in prosecution of the late remonstrance to the two houses of Parliament as also against those persons who were the inviters of the late invasion from Scotland (E.S.T.C., no. R5115). 58 Old English blood boyling afresh in Leicestershire men occasioned by the Late barbarous invasion of the Scots (1648) (E.S.T.C., no. R40522). 59 Reverend Alderman Atkins (the shit-breech) his speech, to Mr. Warner the venerable Mayor of London, the wise aldermen, and most judicious Common-Councell men, in relation to the present affaires in Kent, Essex, and Surrey, concerning the Scots invasion, and His Majesties interest (1648) (E.S.T.C., no. R204921). C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 present of that Nation, would have attempted an invasion of England’.53 The letter from Argyle to which Glemham was replying had carefully spoken of ‘the entrance’ of the Scots army and such circumlocutions were regularly used by all sides until 1648. So there was great coyness of language to that point.54 During the campaign of the Scots into England in 1648 the term is more frequently used, eight times in all. One anonymous tract, entitled The Scots apostacy, displayed, in a treacherous invasion of the English against the law of nations, even helpfully offered a definition: ‘Invasion is the comming in of forraign forces into a Country, without the invitation or consent of the said Country: and of this clearly the Scots are guilty’.55 For this unknown author, Scots are foreigners. So much for Calvin’s case. In the ensuing months, and during the English occupation of Scotland in and after 1650, usage of the term ‘invasion’ is sparing. Nothing printed with a royal or parliamentary imprimatur uses the word, just eight pamphlet titles albeit including two declarations by Lieutenant General Oliver Cromwell and one by Lord General Thomas Fairfax. The earlier of Cromwell’s is entitled: The declaration of Lieutenant Generall Crumwell concerning the kingdom of Scotland, and their invading the realme of England. And his resolution to march into the said kingdom with his army, for restitution of goods and cattell to all His Majesties subjects of England, who have suffered since their first invasion.56 They had invaded, it seems; he had simply ‘march[ed] into the said kingdom’.57 Thus these are separate kingdoms and therefore invasion is possible. The independent press were less restrained. A letter from Lord Grey of Groby to Philip Skippon was published under the title Old English blood boyling afresh in Leicestershire men occasioned by the Late barbarous invasion of the Scots.58 The polemicist Marchamont Nedham, during his brief royalist phase, spoke of ‘Reverend Alderman Atkins (the shit-breech) his speech . . . concerning the Scots invasion’. 59 Perhaps less surprisingly, there is only one pamphlet from the period of Cromwell’s campaigns in Scotland in and after 1650 in which the English or the Scots use the word invasion. That exception is when the Presbyterian minister Christopher Love, on the eve of his execution for treason in 1652, published, as an appendix to a protestation of innocence, ‘a declaration of my judgement concerning Cromwells unlawfull invasion of the kingdom of Scotland’. Love claimed that the invasion had been planned in Rome The English Revolution as a civil war 737 and at ‘the instigation of Jesuites, and the Papists Party to root out the Protestant Party in Scotland. He used the word thirteen times in all, five of them in one paragraph: Neighbouring nations who are also, clearly, neighbouring states, cannot engage in a civil war with one another. But the Covenanters who would not accept Charles II as a king of Scotland only, but as the king of Great Britain, did not accept that they had invaded England or that they had been invaded by the England. Theirs was a bellum sociale not a bellum civile. Finally to Ireland. In the 8,000 and more ‘depositions’ taken from survivors of the ‘massacres’ in and after the winter of 1641/2 and discussing the violence across all thirtytwo counties of Ireland,61 the term ‘civil war’ does not appear once. In contrast, the term ‘rebellion’ occurs 3,472 times. That seems pretty emphatic. The depositions were, after all, taken over the years 1642–4 with stragglers from later years. Both king and parliament relentlessly speak of ‘the Irish Rebellion’, while those Catholics who took the oath of allegiance to God, King and Patria call themselves ‘your Majesty’s loyal Catholic subjects’.62 And yet, and yet. The Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny established a popularlyelected general assembly with representatives from every county in Ireland. It ordered elections to provincial and county councils. It organized the collection of taxes and the formation of regional armies co-ordinated by a supreme council drawn from the general assembly. It developed competing sets of war aims directed at securing military, political and ecclesiastical control of the whole of Ireland.63 Its opponents included fellow Old English Catholics who had been settled in Ireland for more than 400 years, their leader after all being the twelfth Anglo-Irish Butler Earl of Ormond in the Irish peerage. They also included many Old English Protestants as well as many more in their second or third generation of domicile in Ireland. So this was a civil war as Cicero, Livy or Tacitus would have called it, and in the sixteen-forties it was a civil war that never owned its name. 60 C. Love, A cleare and necessary vindication of the principles and practices of me Christopher Love, since my tryall before, and condemnation by, the High Court of Iustice (1651) (E.S.T.C., no. R202748). The word invasion occurs 13 times in the pamphlet, including at the end of the title page. 61 All available free and online, in transcription and digitally imaged, and fully searchable, at Trinity College Library Dublin, 1641 Depositions <http://1641.tcd.ie> [accessed 3 Aug. 2017]. 62 See J. Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation? Oaths and the Confederation of Kilkenny’, in Popular Culture and Political Agency in Early Modern England and Ireland: Essays in Honour of John Walter, ed. M. J. Braddick and P. Withington (Woodbridge, 2017), pp. 243–66. 63  Siochr M. O u, Confederate Ireland, 1642–49: a Constitutional and Political Analysis (Dublin, 1998). Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 I shall . . . lay down some Arguments to prove the unlawfulnesse of the English Army’s invading Scotland. Yet I intend not to handle the case of Invasion, to shew in what cases only an Invasion of another Nation in a Hostile manner is lawfull: I am from all my books, that I cannot consult with Casuists in that point; all that I shall doe at present, is to give some Scripture instances, that may hint unto us the unwarrantablenesse of the War with that Nation of the same Religion, and in Covenant with us; and then give reasons and considerations, drawn from interest of State, against the unlawfull Invasion of Scotland. Had God given me life, I intended a large Treatise concerning the Usurpation of the Government of England, and the unlawfulnesse of the Invasion of Scotland; but my collections being lost and taken away, they must dye with me; I hope more able hands will write against the Invasion, though they cannot fight against the Invaders.60 738 The English Revolution as a civil war 64 R. Armstrong, ‘Ormond, the Confederate peace talks and Protestant royalism’, in Kingdoms in Crisis: Ireland  Siochr in the 1640s: Essays in Honour of Donal Crogan, ed. M. O u (Dublin, 2001), pp. 122–40. 65 P. Lenihan, Confederate Catholics at War, 1642–9 (Cork, 2001). 66 The foundational study remains Lowe, ‘The Glamorgan mission’. 67  hAnnrachain, ‘Conflicting loyalties, conflicted rebels: political and religious allegiance among the T. O Confederate Catholics of Ireland’, English Hist. Rev., cxix (2004), 851–72. 68 Morrill, ‘An Irish Protestation?’, pp. 248–50, 256–9. 69 J. Ohlmeyer, ‘Burke, Ulick, marquess of Clanricarde (1604–1658)’, O.D.N.B. (Oxford, 2004; online edn., Jan. 2008) <http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/3996> [accessed 28 July 2017]. C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 Some of the battles across the sixteen-forties involved men sent from Britain, and especially from Scotland, to protect what they invariably called ‘British Protestant’ interests in Ireland.64 More than half of all those battles and skirmishes, in which thousands rather than hundreds of regimented soldiers fought, were contested by men permanently settled in Ireland.65 It is hard in these circumstances not to impose the term bellum civile as a distinct element in the wars in Ireland. But we do have to impose it. I can find little evidence of the use of the phrase within the island of Ireland at the time. Looking at the Irish conflict, the king consistently referred to the rebellion of 1641 but equally consistently sought to make a settlement with the ‘rebels’ that would result in their participation – on his side – in the wars in England. He was willing in ways resisted by his own lord lieutenant (hence his reliance on the extraordinary – in two senses – mission of the earl of Glamorgan) to grant to the Confederates the prospect of an effectively autonomous kingdom under Catholic control if only they would send their fighting men across the Irish Sea.66 And from the Irish Catholic point of view, only a royalist victory in England could create the conditions for a Catholic government in Ireland. Despite the huge case for mutual assistance, there were, however, two stumbling blocks. The first was the not-so-small demand of the papal nuncio for the creation of a Catholic confessional state. And the second was that while Charles would give Catholics full religious freedom and full political equality, he would not agree to the return of confiscated lands to the Catholic Church, and this delayed agreement until it was too late, and both parties suffered catastrophe.67 The Irish wars might look like wars of religion in the purest sense, but of course nothing is ever as simple as that. It is true that the vast majority of Catholics joined the Confederation of Kilkenny, and indeed no-one could join the Confederation of Kilkenny unless he or she took a solemn and very Catholic oath after making confession, attending Mass and receiving Holy Communion. And there was no ethnic test: all Catholics, be they Irish, Scottish or English (the Welsh being subsumed into the English), were welcomed as Confederates.68 But some leading Catholics, not least the marquess of Clanricarde, never joined the Confederation and supported instead the king’s lord lieutenant, the Protestant marquess of Ormonde.69 And, of course, there was a three-way split within the Protestant community: those English of Ireland, including many descendants of the medieval settlers, who supported the king; the English of Ireland drawn mainly from those who had settled since 1580 and especially with the Ulster plantations that began in 1609, who supported the English parliament; and the Scots of Ulster. At various points in the sixteen-forties, Protestant groups were fighting one another rather than the Catholic Confederation. All that being said, the fundamental divide was Protestant versus Catholic, at least until 1649. Nothing illustrates this more than the history of atrocity. The civil war in England was not so very uncivilized. The number of civilians killed in cold blood was very small The English Revolution as a civil war 739 70 The best overviews are by B. Donagan, ‘Atrocity, war crime, and treason in the English civil war’, American Hist. Rev., xcix (1994), 1137–66; and I. Jones [nee Volmer], ‘A sea of blood? Massacres during the wars of the three kingdoms, 1641–53’, in Theatres of Violence: Massacre, Mass Killing, and Atrocity throughout History, ed. P. G. Dwyer and L. Ryan (New York, 2012), pp. 63–80. But for detailed case studies, including Leicester, Bolton and Basing House, see I. Volmer, ‘A comparative study of massacres during the wars of the three kingdoms, 1641–53’ (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis (2007)), pp. 91–103, 151–67. 71  Siochr M. O u, ‘Atrocity, codes of conduct and the Irish in the British civil wars 1641–53’, Past & Present, xcv (2007), 55–86; Lenihan, pp. 209–14, and for case studies, Volmer, ‘A comparative study of massacres’, pp. 169–79 (sack of Cashel) and passim. 72 There has been an explosion of material on the background to the 1641 rebellion, especially since the publication online of the depositions of survivors in 1641. A good summary of the current state of scholarship is J. Cope, ‘The Irish Rising’, in Braddick, pp. 77–95. Fundamental are A. Clarke, ‘The “1641” massacres’, in Ireland,  Siochr 1641: Contexts and Reactions, ed. M. O u and J. Ohlmeyer (Manchester, 2013), E. Darcy, The Irish Rebellion of 1641 and the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (2013), and N. Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (Oxford, 2001), ch. 8. 73 K. Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land: the ‘Adventurers’ and the Cromwellian Settlement in Ireland (Oxford, 1970), chs. 1–2. Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 (certainly in comparison with the Thirty Years War on the Continent), and the number of men in arms killed in cold blood very limited. Prince Rupert’s so-called massacre of parliamentarians in Bolton on 28 May 1644 and his even more notorious sack of Leicester shortly before the battle of Naseby in June 1645, together with Cromwell’s assault on, and denial of quarter at, Basing House in November 1645, are the only examples that stand out.70 In each case killings in cold blood are now agreed to have been in scores not hundreds, and each was followed by orders protecting the lives of numerous prisoners. In contrast, in Ireland there were many massacres in which no quarter was given. In battles on English soil, it was usual for there to be four prisoners for every man killed; in Ireland precisely the reverse. At the battle of Dungan’s Hill in County Meath (August 1647) all those Irish Confederates who surrendered were massacred (at least 1,000 of them). Similarly, the many hundreds of Catholics who took refuge in a church at the end of the siege of Cashel in county Tipperary the following month were massacred after surrendering, some of the Catholic clergy being tortured to death. It was a different kind of war in Ireland and those differences can be attributed to religious hatred grounded in fear.71 In Ireland, after all, there had been a century of native Catholic resistance leading to English military suppression, land confiscation and the planting of Protestant colonists. In the winter of 1641–2 an attempted elite coup had been overtaken by a popular insurgency and the deaths of thousands of settlers, the minority by acts of violence, the majority from the effects of being driven stark naked into the countryside during one of the coldest winters on record.72 To protect the survivors of these massacres, the English parliament had set out to borrow £1 million from venture capitalists and zealous puritans to pay for an army that would re-establish Protestant and English government. That money was secured against 25 per cent of the productive land of Ireland.73 This is the background to the politics behind the bitter fighting of the sixteen-forties. Of course, the Protestant minority all wanted a confessional Protestant state and the exclusion of Catholics from all positions of trust and power, but differed about what form of Protestantism should prevail and also about how much authority should be devolved from Whitehall and Westminster to Dublin. What created the fragile unity of the Catholic side was fear; fear of religious repression far beyond what had gone before, and fear that their lands would be taken from them and leaving them destitute and quite possibly dead. 740 The English Revolution as a civil war The title I was given was ‘Was the English Revolution a civil war?’ Well yes, but much more than a civil war. We cannot explain why civil war happened, why it ended as it did and what its significance was by seeing it as essentially a war within England. There were civil wars within and between all three of Charles I’s kingdoms, not forgetting the principality of Wales. There was certainly not a British civil war but a whole series of internal wars of different kinds within a state system that was not a state, amongst a group of peoples who defined themselves against one another, an unstable British identity secondary to identities linked to their sense of themselves as the ‘gentes’, the peoples, of an archipelago. For much of the twentieth century it was assumed that the Revolution in seventeenth century England was driven by social conflict. A mountain 74  Fiaich, ‘Republicanism and separatism in the 17th century’, Leachtai Choluim The classic statement is by T. O Cille, ii (1971), 25–37 and available online at <http://theirelandinstitute.com/republic/02/pdf/ofiaich002.pdf> [accessed 9 Aug. 2017]. The most passionate statement of the case has been translated and edited by J. Minahane, Conor O’Mahony: an Argument Defending the Right of the Kingdom of Ireland, 1645 (Cork, 2010). And see also I. W. S. Campbell, ‘John Punch, Scotist Holy War, and the Irish Catholic revolutionary tradition in the 17th century’, Jour. History of Ideas, lxxvii (2016), 401–21. 75  Siochr For the most recent discussions, see M. O u, ‘Propaganda, rumour and myth: Oliver Cromwell and the massacre at Drogheda’ and J. Morrill, ‘The Drogheda massacre in Cromwellian context’, both in Age of Atrocity: Violence and Political Conflict in Early Modern Ireland, ed. D. Edwards, P. Lenihan and C. Tait (Dublin, 2007), pp. 266–82, 242–65. 76 S. O’Callaghan, To Hell or Barbados (Co. Kerry, 2000). For a major revision of the traditional view on the scale of transportation, see H. Carlson, ‘Irish emigration an involuntary migration to Barbados: 1649–60’ (unpublished University of Cambridge M.Phil. thesis, 2013), available in the Seeley History Library, Cambridge. 77 The most recent and best account is J. Cunningham, Conquest and Land in Ireland: the Transplantation to Connacht, 1649–80 (2011), esp. chs. 2, 3, 5, 6. C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 If there was civil war in Ireland in the sixteen-forties, it lay concealed by a war of religion and a bellum sociale, a redefinition of the relation of the kingdoms of England and Ireland and of the peoples of England and the several peoples of Ireland (including Scots). And perhaps it was buried within one more kind of internal war. The Irish rebellion of 1641 has many of the characteristics of the Jewish revolt of 66 A.D. There is evidence from the 1641 depositions of some popular support for a war of independence, a casting-off of allegiance to the house of Stuart and for an Irish king or Ireland governed by a local leader under a Spanish protectorate. But the leadership of the Confederation stamped on this, and burnt in public the only publication advocating it.74 All those who joined the Confederation swore an oath containing an unequivocal promise of obedience to Charles I and his heirs. This is the royalism that allowed, in 1646 and 1649, most Catholics to make common cause with the Protestant Ormondists in the final showdown with Cromwell that resulted in the greatest of all massacres, those at Drogheda and Wexford in the autumn of 1649.75 So I will not repeat my wellknown views on these except to remind us that the scale of the English military operations in Ireland in the period 1649–53 resulted in thousands of deaths and executions and tens of thousands of men, for the most part, given free passage to Europe or enforced passage to indentured servitude in Barbados and Virginia.76 But it also resulted in the confiscation and redistribution of more than 40 per cent of the land of Ireland, from Catholics born in Ireland to Protestants who saw themselves as British. If we are looking for a revolution in the mid seventeenth century, there was an irreversible redistribution of land, wealth and power, not in England but in Ireland. In 1641, Catholics born in Ireland owned more than 60 per cent of the land; by 1660 they owned about 15 per cent and by 1710 less than 10 per cent.77 The English Revolution as a civil war 741 78 All this is fully explored in a special issue of the Huntington Libr. Quart., lxxviii (2015) entitled Revisiting Revisionism: Personalities and the Profession. See esp. the chapters by J. Morrill, D. Hirst and J. Walter. 79 This was the theme of my Ford Lectures in Oxford in 2006 entitled ‘Living with Revolution’ and hopefully soon to be published under the title ‘The Peoples’ Revolution: the wars of three kingdoms and the transformation of Britain and Ireland 1647–62’. Historical Research, vol. 90, no. 250 (November 2017) C 2017 Institute of Historical Research V Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/histres/article-abstract/90/250/726/5603580 by guest on 22 July 2020 of scholarship failed to sustain the Whig and Marxist thesis. New social historians and post-revisionist historians of political culture have demonstrated deep processes of social change within England that help to explain the nature of the conflict, why it was so utterly unlike the baronial wars of the past.78 Men and, to an extent, women across society now had economic freedom, a freedom that came from education and the free circulation of news and information which bred a confidence that permitted them freer political choices. Of course, many chose to remain deferent to their social superiors. Many others exercised their independence. But was tension within and between social groups sufficient to generate the greatest and most sustained period of organized violence in English history? What this article suggests is that alongside, and perhaps instead of, social tensions within England, it is profitable to see ethnic tensions within and between the peoples of Scotland and Ireland and England as the principal driver of the interconnected wars and any revolutions of the mid seventeenth century. The dynastic agglomerate of the house of Stuart, like other dynastic agglomerates all over Europe, was in a period of transition and crisis as congeries of territories historically separate were brought together. The English civil wars used to be seen as a point of transition from feudalism to capitalism. But the British civil wars can be more appropriately seen as a point of transition, paralleled across western, northern and southern Europe, from Reformation to Enlightenment, from the confessional state to the secularized pluralistic state, from loose state systems to nation states. And if there was a revolution in the seventeenth century, an unreversed transfer of wealth and power, it was driven by that process. In the sixteen-fifties monarchy was abolished and a Commonwealth established. That Commonwealth reduced three parliaments to one, three legal systems to one, three economic systems to one, and in the process effected in Ireland an irreversible redistribution of land, wealth and power along ethnic and religious lines, in Scotland a later reversed redistribution of wealth and power, and in England very limited redistributions. In the end, English hegemony within a transformed state system was the legacy. Claims of an English Revolution remain shaky; claims for a British Revolution look more interesting.79 Was the English Revolution a civil war? Better to say: was the British Revolution a series of internal wars of which some can be helpfully designated civil wars? More of a mouthful but more to the point.