English Civil War
Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642 and lost his head seven years later. The quarrel was about money, religion and who decides. He had governed for eleven years without calling Parliament, funding himself by reviving obsolete levies including ship money, and had provoked a war with Scotland by trying to impose an English prayer book on the kirk. The war forced him to summon Parliament in 1640, and the Long Parliament proceeded to execute his chief minister, abolish the prerogative courts, and pass an act preventing its own dissolution. The breach came when he entered the Commons in January 1642 with soldiers to arrest five members and found them gone. The country divided along lines that were regional, religious and social all at once — the north and west and the Anglican gentry for the king, London, the ports, East Anglia and the puritan middling sort for Parliament — and neither side had an army. Parliament won because it had London, the navy, the customs and the taxable wealth, and because it built the New Model Army in 1645 as a national professional force rather than a collection of regional levies. Naseby in June 1645 ended the first war. Charles then negotiated with everybody, brought in the Scots, and produced a second war that convinced the army he could not be treated with. Some 200,000 people died out of five million, a higher proportion than in the First World War. The republic that followed lasted eleven years and was ended by the army that had made it. What did not go back was the constitutional question: no English monarch after 1660 attempted to govern without Parliament, and the one who tried in 1688 was removed in ten weeks.
- Year: 1642 CE
- Category: Military
