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By Root 1233 0

of a cause changed by military escalation and formal military alliance with the Covenanters. A year later, at the time of Laud’s death, Parliament was in a strengthening military position, with further administrative improvements in hand. But this escalation was closely related to divisions within the coalition, which suggested that the political position was not improving as quickly as military fortunes did. What kind of military victory to pursue was a divisive issue, as was the nature of the post-Laudian settlement which the victory would allow to be imposed.

A week before Laud was executed, and apparently in the same spirit of vengeance, Carew and the two Hothams also lost their lives, unprotected from the workings of martial law against them for having considered handing over their military charges to the King. What did these deaths mean? These men died traitors” deaths, having abandoned what they thought was the cause of 1642 and having been left to the mercy of martial law.15 But had they really acted dishonourably? No-one wanted to lose the war, but it was not becoming any clearer, even to the central characters, what winning it would mean.

The executions of January 1645

Death was of course at the heart of war. Every death is a means of appreciating the significance of a life, and the questions raised by the high-profile deaths of Pym, Laud, Carew and the Hothams could be asked about all the victims of the slaughter in 1644. Marston Moor was the largest battle of the war and may have been the largest battle ever fought on English soil. Those responsible for burying them thought that 4,150 royalist soldiers had died on the field; many others died of their wounds subsequently.16 According to the most authoritative estimate, 1644 saw the largest number of military engagements of the war. A massive research effort has enumerated 645 separate ‘incidents’ of armed conflict in England and Wales between 1642 and 1660, ranging from the large pitched battles such as Marston Moor to minor skirmishes which do not rate a mention in most military histories of the war. The vast bulk of these incidents, 555, took place between 1642 and 1646, and the two most eventful years were 1643 (156) and 1644 (191), and 1644 was also a particularly bloody year of the war. It has been estimated that around 62,000 men died in fighting between 1642 and 1646. Of these perhaps 23,000 men died in 1643 and 22,000 the following year. Together this is probably more than half of the total number of deaths in the wars of the whole period 1642–60.17 On 11 January 1645, the day after the execution of Laud, Charles ordered an attack on Abingdon, in which many men lost their lives: it was the harbinger of another very bloody year of fighting.18

These incidents, and the loss of life, were reported in a confused and partisan way, and newsletters did not locate them in a larger strategic context. This makes the statistics unreliable in detail, although the larger picture is probably reasonably accurate. Contemporaries, of course, confronted the same problem: the war was reported day by day, as it happened, with all the chance and contingency that such coverage applies. ‘The war is like a football play, where one side doth give the other a kind of overthrow, and strikes up another’s heels, but presently they rise up and give the other as great a blow again’, reported Mercurius Cambro-Britannicus.19 Newsletter readers were left to make sense of this as best they could, and it is clear that it was the fortunes of individual commanders that were easiest to follow, not the overall condition of the war. It seems likely that the political mood changed quickly, as a run of victories or defeats was reported, but the overall direction of the war would have been difficult to divine. Accompanying these uncertainties was an increasingly fractious public dispute among parliamentarians about the purpose of the war. What was it for, what did it mean and how would it end?

Such uncertainties were opportunities, of course, for people with a message to sell, metaphorically