The English Civil War

The short analysis

Between roughly 1642 and 1651, England fought a series of interconnected wars that began as a quarrel over who held ultimate authority, the crown or parliament, and ended with a republic built on the wreckage of a beheaded king. The conflict did not erupt suddenly. Decades of tension over royal finance, the rights of parliament, and the direction of the Church of England had been accumulating since at least the early seventeenth century. Charles I believed in a divine right to govern without interference; many of his subjects, especially those in parliament and in the reformed Protestant tradition, believed that law and consent set limits on royal power. When Charles attempted to govern without parliament for eleven years and then tried to impose a new prayer book on Scotland, the resulting revolt forced him to recall parliament, and the two sides proved unable to reach a settlement. War followed. The king's forces, known as Royalists or Cavaliers, fought parliament's New Model Army across England, Scotland, and Ireland in a conflict that cost proportionally enormous numbers of lives. Parliament won, the king was tried for treason against his own people, and in January 1649 he was publicly executed in London. The republic that followed, eventually dominated by Oliver Cromwell, lasted until 1660, when the monarchy was restored. Yet nothing was truly restored: after 1688 it became clear that parliament, not the crown, held final authority in England.