Royle - The Civil War: The War of the Three Kingdoms 1638-1660

Thesewords are being written some 360 years after two rival English armies faced oneanother across the rolling patchwork countryside of south Warwickshire at aplace called Edgehill. On a late summers day they engaged in a battle whichleft 1500 dead and many more wounded; ahead lay other battles which would scarthe English landscape as warfare swept from the centre of the country to thenorth and the west, creating casualties, ruining lives and destroying property.This is the traditional starting point for a conflict which has long been knownas the English Civil War, the bloody internecine confrontation between thosewho supported the Crown and those who backed the claims of parliament. But inboth armies there were Scottish and Irish soldiers, and although the Battle ofEdgehill began the conflict in England, the war also raged in the adjoiningkingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. Far from being purely an English civil war,these were the wars of Charles Is three interconnected kingdoms, and thebloodshed in all three would continue right up to the restoration of KingCharles II in 1660.

In recentyears historians have begun putting the events of 1638-1660 into a Britishcontext. Instead of viewing the conflict as purely English they have examinedit as a train of events which also involved Scotland and Ireland and to whichall three kingdoms made a contribution. Wales, too, was involved. Although someexperiences were different in each of the component kingdoms and although theviolence in the Celtic fringes was often isolated from the main events, thereis sufficient linkage to regard the war as an inclusive conflict. This is notto deny the fact that the fighting in England between 1642 and 1645 was aviolent struggle between two groups of Englishmen who supported either KingCharles I or the parliament. On that level it was a civil war as bitter as theearlier Wars of the Roses or the later American Civil War. Rather, it isimpossible to view the conflict in its entirety without taking into accountevents in Scotland and Ireland; by the same token Scottish and Irish historycannot be read without understanding the English and wider British contexts.And, throughout, there are the linking figures of the two Stewart kings,Charles I and Charles II, whose actions provoked reactions in all threekingdoms.

The seventeenth-century wars in Britainhave produced a huge bibliography, and it would have been impossible to attempta new work without a thorough reading of the writers and historians who haveilluminated the period. It would be invidious of me not to recognise theirlabours and to thank them for the learning and inspiration they provided duringan invigorating period of research. In particular, I would like to thank andacknowledge the following authors whose books are listed in the bibliographyand are mentioned in the notes and references: John Adair, Gerald Aylmer, T. C.Barnard, J. C. Beckett, Martyn Bennett, Keith Brown, John Buchan, NicholasCanny, Bernard Capp, Charles Carlton, Thomas Carlyle, Edward J. Cowan, PeterDonald, Frances Dow, Christopher Durston, William Ferguson, Charles HardingFirth, Antonia Fraser, Edward M. Furgol, Samuel Rawson Gardiner, Peter Gaunt, J.T. Gilbert, Roger Hainsworth, Christopher Hibbert, Christopher Hill, RonaldHutton, Edward Hyde (Earl of Clarendon), John Kenyon, Mark Kishlansky, MauriceJ. Lee, Allan I. Macinnes, Rosalind Mitchison, John Morrill, the editors andcontributors to the New History of Ireland, Vol. III, Jane Ohlmeyer, RichardOllard, Michael Perceval-Maxwell, Tom Reilly, Ivan Roots, Conrad Russell, KevinSharpe, Roy Sherwood, David Stevenson, Lawrence Stone, C. V. Wedgwood, AustinWoolrych, Blair Worden, Peter Young. Austin Woolrychs