Those who kept these careful records were right about the importance of what they had seen to the lives of the men and women of the future. We owe our state of government to the English Civil War, but most of its beneficiaries have little idea who fought whom or when or why. Nor do most of us care; what little we know seems remote and difficult to grasp, with stiff figures on battlefields and stiffer constitutional debates. Yet actually, the English Civil War was the making of our country. It made us the nation we are, the countries we are, the people we are. It also created those more permanent revolutions by influence: Thomas Jefferson and George Washington recalled and revered the Good Old Cause against the king’s tyranny, and the French revolutionaries had read their Milton. The glories and liberations of that long-ago conflict still benefit us today; so too its failings and limitations are with us, part of our blood, setting the horizon of our expectations. And to understand ourselves, we have to understand the people we were, the people who fought in that war.
This book has two goals: to tell the story of the English Civil War up to and including the execution of the king, and to bring to life the people who fought in it, died in it, and in doing so changed the history of the world for ever.
To do this, I tell the story of the war from the points of view of the people involved. The war is interesting because it was fought by people, men and women. My cast of characters ranges from Charles I himself, disastrous shaper of his own fate, through his most educated and articulate opponents, men like John Milton, and through men and women utterly obscure before the war and glintingly prominent after it, men like Oliver Cromwell, through to what Charles himself might have called ‘the meaner sort’, men like witch-finder Matthew Hopkins and revolutionary Gerrard Winstanley, godly women like Anna Trapnel. We first glimpse these people before the war, and we see how the war changes them, creates unexpected chances for them to change their lives, overthrows what they thought they could take for granted. When the war ends, when King Charles is dead, we see what all these people have left, what remains of their lives. Mine is not an even-handed portrait. Not all of these people represent something beyond themselves and their individual stories. Some figures that were important do not get as much space as the well-informed reader might expect. But this unevenness was part of contemporaries’ experience of the war; they too did not always see a ‘big picture’, but the small details of a burned barn, a changed pattern of church service, a son lost in battle.
The armed conflict was also a major event in its own right. Estimates suggest that around 800,000 people in the British Isles died during its course, the majority of them in Ireland. One in four of all men served in the armies on one side or the other, which suggests that a majority of able-bodied men was involved. The war was not a clean and tidy affair of sabres and dashing cavalry charges; it was a bloody business largely driven by guns – cannons and muskets and pistols – which at times appears to have combined the worst aspects of the American Civil War and Vietnam. Both sides used soft lead bullets that did terrible damage to flesh. For years afterwards, the London streets were full of one-legged beggars. Cities and castles were razed to the ground.
There were atrocities involving civilians, again especially in Ireland. The war was expensive, and individual families were ruined – or made – by its sweeping hand. And so people came to see change all around them. They thought that the world had been transformed for ever, for them and for their families. Because they thought that, some of them began questioning many taken-for-granted aspects of life, looking in new ways at the purpose of women, the purpose of government and of its leaders, and at the purpose of human beings. Some of what they invented still governs our lives: universal male suffrage, promotion on merit, women’s involvement in politics, the ordinary man’s need for a home and food.
Isabella Twysden’s Civil War diary illustrates the way big events look to small people. In her journal, however, a big event could be personal or political; she gave equal weight to the birth of a new baby, or King Charles’s capture by his enemies in the Parliamentarian army. She tried to chronicle her own life and the life of the nation, with no anxiety about the disparity of scale, because to her both kinds of events were important.
She tried to keep a record of news, a daily chronicle. She didn’t write down what she felt, but only what happened. Her first three entries for 1645 read:
The first of Janua. Mr John Hotham was beheaded on Tower Hill.
The 2nd of Janu Sr John Hotham (father to Mr Hotham) was beheaded on Tower Hill.
The 10 of January My Lord of Canterbury was beheaded on Tower Hill and was buried at Barking Church
Interspersed with the doings of the great she recorded events crucial to her:
The 8 Feb I came to Peckham great with child, and ride all the way a horseback, and I thank God had no hurt
The 6 of March [1645], between one and two in the morning I was brought to bed of a boy, the 7 he was christened and named Charles, the gossips [godparents] were my brother Charles and Francis Twysden and my Lady Astley [wife of Jacob Astley]
The 11 of March there was the terriblest wind, that had been known since ever the like, it did a great deal of hurt
The 3 of April a little before 3 in the morning my sister Twysden was brought to bed of a girl at Maling, it was christened the 5 and named Ann, without gossips … the new way.
It might seem incongruous that Isabella recorded this mass of detail about her baby’s christening and her niece’s christening in a war diary, but she did so because domestic details like this had themselves become battlefields. In particular, the baptism of babies had become caught up in the political divisions the war had created. Many families of traditional views were made miserable by the difficulty of getting vulnerable infants baptized by their preferred rite. As George Thomason amassed a collection of over a hundred tracts on the question of infant baptism, worried parents tried to do their own homework, anxiously poring over the Bibles and pamphlets much as modern parents might agonize over vaccination. In 1646, when their child was born, John and Lucy Hutchinson took some time to decide, but eventually chose not to have the new baby baptized, whereupon, Lucy wrote, they were reviled as sectarians. The Directory of Public Worship, which replaced the prayer book in 1645, dispensed with the sign of the cross, and the minister was told bluntly to sprinkle the child’s face ‘without adding any other ceremony’. Godparents were also ruled out firmly, and instead the child was presented by its father. Some people accepted this philosophically. Still others rejoiced at the opportunity to choose adult baptism, and found names for themselves that reflected their faith. But the diarist John Evelyn loathed it, and had his babies christened at home, according to the old rite, while he continued to act as godparent for friends who felt the same.
This is how war and other such large events are experienced: Isabella juxtaposes Fairfax’s capture of 4000 soldiers at the pivotal battle of Naseby in 1645 with worries about the money owed to the baby’s monthly nurse, who is leaving for London. For her, the personal and the political are well blended. My intention is to achieve the same mix in this book. This method has its drawbacks, as Isabella’s diary shows; the stories that result can seem to jump about, and strict chronology is sometimes sacrificed to the writer’s interest in particular events. But it is truer to how this war was felt. There was not one Civil War, but thousands, different for each person involved.
So large impersonal changes such as constitutional reforms are important but only because they are eventually experienced by people. I found Charles Stuart much more interesting than absolutism, Oliver Cromwell more compelling than Puritanism. And neither man is helpfully summed up by a list of his beliefs, because both were also feeling human beings, inconsistent and emotional, and so were all those who fought alongside them.
The story of the Civil War begins