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50. The execution of Charles I. (Engraving, anon., 1649)

51. The frontispiece of Eikon Basilike portraying Charles I, the royal martyr. (Engraving, William Marshall, 1649)

52. The equestrian statue of Charles I at Charing Cross pictured soon after it was erected. (Drawing, anon., c. 1700)

53. The Cromwell statue in Parliament Square pictured soon after it was erected. (Photograph, York and Son, 1899/1900)

Maps

1. The military situation in late 1642

2. The military situation in late 1643

3. The military situation in late 1644

4. The military situation in late summer 1645

5. Principal battles in Ireland and Scotland

Preface

In late April 1646 Charles I, a monarch very jealous of his dignity and personal authority, slipped out of Oxford disguised as a servant. A week later, after some apparently hesitant wanderings in the company of his chaplain and one personal friend, he surrendered to a Scottish army camped at Southwell, Nottinghamshire. Eight years earlier he had set out to crush religious protests in Scotland, never quite able to see the protesters as anything but rebels. But their campaign had set off a political and religious crisis that reverberated through all three of Charles’s kingdoms – Scotland, Ireland and then England. Charles had been unable to establish military control in any of them and, following defeat in England, surrender to his original tormentors had come to seem his best option.

Charles I leaving Oxford in disguise, April 1646

This personal humiliation signalled the end of one of the most destructive conflicts in English history, in which a larger percentage of the population may have died than in the First World War, and huge amounts of property had been destroyed. Armies had tramped the land, bringing in their wake terrible plagues. The coming harvest was bad, the crops ruined by wet weather, and over the next four years famine threatened. To many contemporaries these were unmistakable judgements of God on a sinful land: war, disease and famine, three of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. After four years of war in England, however, there was still no agreement about which sins, specifically, were being punished.

Three days after the surrender of the King a London bookseller called George Thomason bought a tract, Gods Fury, Englands Fire, which promised the answer. Thomason, an avid (perhaps obsessive) collector of pamphlets, had acquired around thirty tracts published during or dealing with the events of that week. They were dominated by two issues: the surrender of the King and the chaos of religious opinion that many now saw in England. With the King defeated, God’s judgement on the battle of arms now clear, it did not take much imagination to identify religion as the issue which should now be addressed. John Benbrigge, the author of Gods Fury, took as his text Isaiah xlii, 24-5:

Who gave Jacob for a spoil and Israel to the robbers? Did not the Lord? He against whom we have sinned? For they would not walk in his ways, neither were they obedient to his Law. Therefore he hath poured on him the fury of his anger, and the strength of battle, and it hath set him on fire round about; yet he knew not; and it burned him, and he laid it not to heart.

The general relevance was clear, but what was it that English sinners should lay to heart? Benbrigge promised to identify ‘those spiritual incendiaries which have set church and state on fire’ and exhorted ‘all persons to join together in seeking to quench it’. He also promised to explain how to ‘prevent the fire from being unquenchable in our ruin’. Like many others he set out his partisan view in a laboured and formalistic argument, based on scriptural authorities. His difficulty though was that reasoning of this kind, and scriptural authority, could not convince doubters. In the lush world of civil war print there were too many competing voices of reason, and divergent readings of scripture, to clinch an argument this way. Other partisans could make a competing