Civil wars are notoriously terrible. They’re more violent, harder to end, and create longer lasting animosities than other types of conflict. In 1645, America had largely been spared from these effects and problems, but it wouldn’t be spared from people affected by them.
Introduction
But first! A quick announcement. I’ve just gotten my first full-time teaching job. Yay! And as you’re listening to this, I’ve already pretty much started it. Also yay. But, I don’t know exactly what to expect, and exactly how often I’ll be putting out episodes these first few months. I’ve got all the research in order, and the general outline. But, episodes may or may not be a little sporadic for a while. I just don’t know. There’s so much good stuff coming up, though, and I really will do my best, so I hope you’ll bear with me.
But, back on topic. I thought I’d spend today preparing for the next phase of our colonial history by giving a brief overview of what was happening in England. Because understanding this time period, and getting a taste of the experience of the war, is going to be key to understanding some of the people who will start playing a major role in our story going forward.
Now, I’m not going to go into all the military aspect of the war, but to sum up what we’ve discussed so far, in the broadest terms, the defeat of the Royalists at the Battle of Marston Moor in July 1644 and the subsequent fall of York to Parliamentary forces was an almost irrecoverable loss for the King. Then, a year later, in June 1645, his army was all but wiped out at Naseby. And, a couple months later, Bristol also fell to Parliament, so there were no more Royalist ports left.
And that’s really the last thing we’ve discussed. After that, there was no question of who would win the war, but exactly how the war would end was another matter. Royalists continued to hold out in a series of sieges, especially around the West Country but all over the place, and this continued resistance lasted for several months.
And after 3.5 years of civil war, England was a mess. Civil Wars in general, have a reputation for being worse than other forms of conflict. They tend to be more violent, more destabilizing, they tend to cause longer lasting animosities, and they tend to be more difficult to stop. That last part is particularly interesting, and I’ll get to it at the end of the episode, but for now, the actual conflict, itself, is what we’ll focus on. Civil wars are, well, personal, while others may be simply business.
And England was no exception. Actually, it was pretty noteworthy in that it seemed to conscientiously work to avoid the worst excesses of civil war, excesses which many of its military leaders had personally witnessed in the Thirty Years War. So, King Charles, for example, decided, against the advice of some of his commanders, by the way, to treat Parliamentary combatants as legitimate military opponents instead of traitors. And Parliament, keenly aware of their leaders’ precarious position regarding treason, tread lightly, too. The Earl of Manchester famously said as much. “The King need not care how oft he fights… If we fight 100 times and beat him 99 he will be King still, but if he beats us but once, or the last time, we shall be hanged, we shall lose our estates, and our posterities be undone.”
And you got noble exchanges between opponents. And you had the odd idealistic offer, like when Lord Brooke offered to simply duel the Earl of Northampton, winner take all, instead of going to war.
So perhaps there is something to this traditional notion of the First Civil War as a noble, honorable conflict, but at the end of the day, the realities of war were unavoidable, and it wasn’t too long before they had started to emerge. The Earl of Southampton, for instance, defected from the Parliamentary cause in 1643 because he was alarmed by what he perceived as its leaders’ tendency toward violence.
Common people were forced to quarter soldiers of both sides, and soldiers of both sides took what they needed to continue their war effort. Parliamentarians destroyed what they considered to be overly Papist Church structures, with some becoming famous for iconoclasm. There’s a story that at the fall of Faringdon the women of the town banded together to protect the Church spire (VERIFY). And, meanwhile Royalists, though they didn’t embark on ideologically motivated campaigns of destruction, left ransacked pubs and taverns in their wake.
To make matters worse, a huge percent of the war’s conflict took the form of sieges, and that’s inevitably a form of warfare which, well, for one, causes a ton of destruction and severely impacts civilians. But it’s also a form of warfare which can quickly lead to moral ambiguity which escalates problems among soldiers. This is because the rules surrounding the proper conduct of sieges revolve around the single messiest, most ambiguous and least intuitive part of the traditional code of warfare, which is the concept of quarter.
The concept of quarter has caused more than its fair share of confusion, and fueled more than its fair share of propaganda, over the centuries, and in fact I would go so far as to say that if you ever hear of pre-20th Century stories of soldiers being killed after surrendering, you should as a matter of course look to see how quarter was treated by both sides in the incident, whether it was offered, denied, whatever, and the English Civil War is particularly illustrative of the issue. I read a compelling article which essentially argued that the combination of a misunderstanding of the rules of quarter coupled with the rise in propaganda was to blame for a lot of the escalation of violence in the First English Civil War.
But I digress. These problems and conflicts regularly arise because quarter is not an intuitive thing. You would probably think that, when a soldier surrenders, it would be a matter of course to accept the surrender and take him prisoner, but that is not always the case. That’s only one of multiple possible terms of surrender. Quarter is accepting a surrender and not killing the person, so if soldiers surrender after being offered quarter, then yes, their lives should be spared. And in fact, quarter was often so lenient that it didn’t even involve taking prisoners, and instead just sending the soldiers home after they promised not to fight again. Most of the time, their weapons and colors weren’t even confiscated, and some of the time, soldiers would actually join the victorious army after surrendering.
But, quarter was only one possible term of surrender, and military commanders were well within their rights to deny quarter. Ending a siege involved some negotiation, and part of that was the terms on which soldiers would surrender. If you surrendered early, you would probably be granted quarter. If you surrendered months later after a ton of bloodshed, there was a much smaller chance that you’d be offered quarter. And, if the besieging army was forced to storm the defenders, quarter was pretty much off the table.
So, it would be pretty common for a military commander to say “if you don’t surrender now, there will be no quarter.” So, after that point, soldiers would be surrendering under mercy. And in this case, mercy wasn’t “I will be merciful,” so much as “you will be at my mercy.” At that point, even if soldiers surrendered, they could be killed. They still couldn’t be tortured, and their bodies couldn’t be mutilated, but whether they lived or died would be up to the besieging commander. In general, though, it would still be in the best interests of the besieging force to minimize the number of people killed, so that defenders weren’t inclined to fight to the death and force the besieging army to storm the keep, but it would be in their best interest to kill at least some of the people, especially leaders, so that the offer of quarter retained its attractiveness, too. And this wasn’t a concept that’s only important to siege warfare, but it is particularly important to siege warfare.
So, siege warfare involved a huge amount of negotiation, and different military commanders played the game differently. Prince Rupert, though he was a professional soldier who was fully and wholly committed to the codes of war, and the importance of those codes for maintaining honorable warfare and the possibility of later reconciliation, was also a relatively aggressive commander. He pushed for quarter harder, he ended the offer sooner, and there were more severe repercussions for denying his offers of quarter than the average commander. Extremely rule-bound, but also aggressive.
And there’s a justifiable reason for this. In siege warfare, something like 3 besieging soldiers would be killed for every defender. Sieging wasn’t fun for either side, and though it may have been more stressful and unpleasant for those under siege, it was actually more costly and deadly for the other side. And if it did come down to storming the city or castle or whatever, well yeah, that wouldn’t be fun for either side, but it was much, much worse for the attacker, so the potential punitive deaths were a disincentive for the defenders to let things get that far.
Without the potential denial of quarter, all the besieging commander would really be able to say would be, “oh, keep going until you really do feel like surrendering, kill as many of my people as you possibly can, and then you can come out and be safe.” And that is actually insane, so potential denial of quarter changed the dynamic and incentivized quicker resolution. It was, “My people are dying out here, so I want you to think really hard about whether you think you can actually win, and decide now whether you’re going to surrender or fight to the possible death.”
Cold, yes. Harsh, yes. Logical, yes. But, the average English person didn’t necessarily understand this at the time. So, when Prince Rupert killed prisoners who had denied quarter, it shocked and appalled people who didn’t understand what was going on, and these misunderstandings were compounded by the rise of propaganda, which was a completely new thing. Parliament had repealed regulations on publishing, and the result was a veritable pamphlet war, with Royalists and Parliamentarians alike promoting their respective causes through rhetoric, both honest and dishonest. The most amusing example of this is that Royalists, mocking Puritan superstitions about witchcraft, had published a pamphlet saying that Royalist General Prince Rupert’s dog was a witch’s familiar, and that Parliamentarians had actually latched onto this and published pamphlets which actually caused many Parliamentarians to believe this. But there was a darker side and that was that propaganda probably contributed violence during the war, and a huge part of that involves the issue of quarter.
So, Parliament, hoping to drum up support for its cause, could publish sensationalized stories of Rupert killing prisoners after they surrendered. How shocking, how vile! But, that also led to retaliation by Parliamentary forces, which led to further retaliation, and propaganda, and retaliation, and propaganda, and soon enough, people weren’t actually adhering as closely to the rules of warfare as they should have. It was a positive feedback loop, the lines were getting blurrier and blurrier, and even today we don’t really know the truth about many of the events in question. But the events, both as they happened and also as they were reported, affected people’s lives, their fears, their opinions, and their reaction to the war. And, I’m going to go through a handful of these stories, just so you can get an idea of what these people were experiencing, and at the very least hearing about.
One of the most famous war crimes, which occurred in early 1644, was the storming of Hopton Castle. And, details of the event are very murky. By Parliamentarian accounts, after taking the castle, Royalist commander Sir Michael Woodhouse stripped the 30 surviving Parliamentarian soldiers and slit their throats before throwing their bodies in the river. Royalist accounts made no indication of torture, and emphasized that they had only surrendered after Woodhouse had begun to storm the castle, meaning long, long after the offer of quarter was over. That still wouldn’t justify any torture, but it fully justified the killing of prisoners. They also fired their own accusations at the Parliamentarians there, saying they’d used poisoned bullets, and had committed atrocities like strangling an 80 year old man to death with a chair. Neither side had any real witnesses, just the testimony of 1-2 participants.
In a much better documented event in July 1644, a Colonel under the Earl of Essex hanged a group of Irish prisoners, who had been offered quarter, with Essex’s approval. The same thing happened again in February 1645, after the fall of Shrewsbury, and at this point Prince Rupert protested the breaches of the codes of war. He said that killing those who had surrendered to quarter was “contrary to the law of nature and nations, contrary to the rules and customs of war, in any parts of the Christian world.” He also emphasized the danger of allowing the hanging of prisoners, which would make the war “more merciless and bloody,” saying “It is like to be so managed that the English nation is in danger of destroying one another or of degenerating into such an animosity and cruelty that all elements of charity, compassion and brotherly affection shall be extinguished.” But, he also said that he would have been unworthy of his own command if, after “soldiers of his own were barbarously murdered in cold blood, after quarter given to them,” he hadn’t “let the authors of this massacre know their own men must pay the price of such acts of inhumanity, and be used as they used their brethren, in the same manner.” You can’t just let people do whatever they want to your men with no repercussions. So, Rupert hanged 13 Parliamentarian prisoners from the same tree Essex had used to hang the Irish. His analysis, by the way, was spot on, and studies 350 years later would substantiate them.
Another thing that happened in 1644, is that Parliament passed an ordinance forbidding quarter to any Irish soldiers found fighting in England. Any Irish person who surrendered under any circumstances, quarter or not, would be killed. So, the Irish had absolutely no reason to surrender, but even more importantly, they also had absolutely no reason to extend the offer of quarter to Parliamentarians they fought, or to respect it if others had offered it. And after this point, many of the supposed massacres committed by Royalist soldiers were actually being committed by Irish soldiers, which is totally understandable. But, those stories also made their way into Parliamentary propaganda and fueled the fire, either against the Royalists, if the Irish issue wasn’t mentioned, or against the Irish, and therefore indirectly the Royalists, if it was.
By the end of the war, there was virtually no attempt to even hide the wanton violence being committed by soldiers. Parliamentarians slaughtered and mutilated a group of over 100 Welsh women after the Battle of Naseby. There was a mass hanging of Dorset civilians, many of whom had been tortured beforehand. And there was prolonged brutality inflicted on prisoners at Oxford.
And that’s the course the war took. If you were a soldier, these were the stories you worried about. If you were a civilian, these were the stories that showed you your side was right. These were the incidents that gradually chipped away at the moderate, middle ground and chance for peaceful reconciliation. These were the stories that turned disagreements into animosity.
And in addition to the increasing animosity, the effects of propaganda, and instances of retaliation, war weariness had really taken hold of the country. Parliament had tripled taxes over the course of the war, after criticizing the King’s taxation. And, they’d introduced a new form of tax, the excise tax, which was deeply unpopular even with their own soldiers. And in addition to taxes, civilians had to give soldiers free quarter and food, while living under constant worry that disgruntled soldiers would plunder them, and they sent multiple petitions to Parliament saying they could not continue to bear the economic burden of the war or soldiers. They’d also locked up sentries without due process, and engaged in martial law, and essentially done everything they’d criticized the King having done in the years leading up to the war. And as the icing on the cake, 1646 marked the beginning of 6 years of terrible harvests.
And, furthermore, after the Army won the war, especially the New Model Army, which was recruited in part by the promise of better pay, Parliament hadn’t actually followed through with that promise either. Most of them hadn’t been paid for months, and pay for some was behind by almost a year, with no signs that anything would change in the forseeable future, so Parliamentary troops were starting to threaten mutiny. I don’t want to let my own biases come through here, but Parliament had gained the upper hand in the war by forming an alliance with the Scots, and then as soon as they no longer needed the Scots, thanks to the New Model Army, they broke their agreement. And then when the Army won the war, they broke their agreement with them, too. And that is a huge part of the reason the second war broke out.
And all of this combined to form a general anxiety in the country, which was starting to manifest in irrational actions. King Charles dismissed Prince Rupert from his service after the fall of Bristol, and I’d put that action in the context of that stress. Around the time of the Battle of Naseby, 36 women were put on trial for witchcraft in Essex, and all but one killed. I’d put that in context of stress, too.
More productively, these months saw the rise of the clubmen, people in towns across the country who decided “I don’t care who wins or loses, I’m protecting my own community.” In a series of risings across the country, they pushed soldiers out of their towns, demanded decreases in taxes, fired on Parliamentary soldiers, and even hunted down and killed Royalist fugitives.
So, I think I’ve given you something of a flavor of the war in England, and by 1645, and even more by 1646, the Royalists were losing, and the war would have to be ended at some point. And that brings us back to what I said at the beginning of the episode.
There’s a lot of discussion of the role various factions played in war breaking out again after the First English Civil War ended, and King Charles’s actions have been especially scrutinized as we’ll see later, but that line of analysis doesn’t take into account the simple fact that civil wars in general are notoriously difficult to stop.
In fact, in the post ‘90s world, where civil wars have made something of a resurgence, there’s been a decent amount of research devoted to questions like “how do we actually stop civil wars,” and “how do we actually prevent them from re-starting?” What does it actually take to get people to be willing to negotiate? How, knowing that the single most important factor in minimizing casualties is shortening these conflicts, do we actually do that? And that is difficult, because on their own, these conflicts have some dynamics which seriously work against peaceful resolution. One of these dynamics is the tendency for one side, even more than in other types of conflict, to push for unilateral victory. And, these wars often only stop when both sides become convinced that they simply cannot achieve a unilateral victory, and the cost of trying becomes too steep. Of course, in 1646 this was a problem because Parliament looked very close to achieving a unilateral victory, and it’s only viable remaining threat came from rival factions within the Parliamentary movement.
And, the other factor in ending Civil Wars, in fact one of the biggest factors not only in ending these wars, but also in how well society actually moves on after the war’s end, and how willing the loser is to accept the new status quo, is whether or not the enemy, particularly the victor, is perceived to have obeyed the codes of war. If people feel that their enemy was guilty of atrocities and war crimes, especially if those things were institutionalized, officially sanctioned acts of policy, reconciliation becomes extraordinarily difficult.
So, given what we’ve just discussed, it’s not even remotely surprising that war broke out again. And again after that. By the end of the war, Parliament was saying, “you know you’re going to lose, just surrender,” and Royalists (not just the King) were replying, “not to the likes of you, you sadistic, iconoclastic, horrifyingly radical traitors.” It didn’t help matters that by the end of the war, Parliament had grown considerably more radical than it had started, and had visible movements growing more radical and more potentially treasonous by the minute. Even without the bad blood, Royalists had good reason to wonder where it would all stop.
And meanwhile, the Parliamentarians themselves were divided between the Presbyterian Parliament, the radically Independent New Model Army, and on yeah, the Scots who were still irritated about the broken agreements and less and less trusting of their English allies. By 1646, none of these groups trusted, or even particularly liked, each other. All had different visions for England, and different ideas about what was negotiable, and what wasn’t.
And it was these dynamics playing in the background when King Charles made his final decision to surrender to the Scots instead of to either the English Parliament or Army. He traveled from Oxford to Newark, where a royalist city was being sieged by a force including Scottish Covenanters, and surrendered. This was April 1646. Oxford fell to Parliament in June, and the first English Civil War was officially over, but the stage was already set for the second one.
And getting back to the subject of America, as this first war ended, there were a few things which pushed people to the colonies. As early as 1644, Royalists were subjected to a 10% tax. And then, of course, there was sequestration. This got a lot of people, because if they really had given their all to the Royalist cause, many of them were hit with unpayable fines to get their property back, and left impoverished with nowhere to go and under a government they were deeply hostile to. Weighing the available options, leaving England would have looked at least relatively attractive.
A lot of these people ended up in Virginia, which was known to have strong Royalist sympathies. And another popular destination for such exiles was Barbados. One particularly interesting Royalist who relocated to Barbados at this point was Ferdinando Paleologus, the last surviving member of the Byzantine royal family. He’d fought for the King, including at Naseby, and after that he went to Barbados and spent the rest of his life there. But there were many, many more. People who had witnessed, and in many cases suffered, the excesses of war, and who went to the New World with harsher opinions and a harsher worldview than the ones who had been living in America. People in America often, passionately supported one side or another, but there was something fundamentally different after all the traumatic experiences and bad blood, and then being driven to America thanks to sequestration and the destruction of their property, people in England weren’t just passionate, they were bitter, angry, and had long since given up any aspiration to the kind of peace which colonists, especially those in Barbados, had always sought.
And the other policy which drove Royalists to America at this point was transportation. Royalist prisoners were given the choice between imprisonment in the Tower of London, or being sent to the colonies, especially to Barbados, as indentured servants. And, the policy soon extended beyond prisoners. Poor people, political dissidents, and Irish people were all fair game. It was a very effective way of silencing potential political dissent, because people were afraid that if they spoke up too much, they’d be sent to do manual labor in the colonies. In 1646, the Worcester House Prison keeper got permission from Parliament to send the people in his prison to the colonies under the transportation policy. These people had only been confined for simple misdemeanors. And, then stories started to circulate about women kidnapping children and selling them for indentured servants in the colonies, a practice called “spiriting.” This truly scared people, especially parents, and in 1645, Parliament passed an ordinance against that practice. But transportation remained a big, intimidating threat and a good way to rid England of potential rabble rousers, and it was one Parliament made full use of.
So, I think we’ve come to a good stopping point, and next episode, we’ll start looking at the changes in the colonies following these developments, news of the King’s final surrender, and the influx of new people.