Wars & Conflicts
English Civil War
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The English Civil War, fought between king and parliament across England, Scotland and Ireland from 1642 to 1651, began in a quarrel over how the church should be governed and worship conducted, and ended with a king executed, episcopacy abolished and, for a decade, the widest religious liberty England had known. The censorship collapsed with the bishops, and Baptists, Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists argued in print about property, scripture and the end of the world before the Restoration of 1660 closed the opening again.
Facts
Consequences
What It SettledEpiscopacy abolished and the king executed in 1649; a decade of unprecedented sectarian freedom in which Quakers, Baptists, Diggers and Fifth Monarchists spread and Jews were readmitted in 1656, closed by the Restoration and the ejection of some two thousand ministers in 1662 2 Death TollCharles Carlton's demographic history of the wars gives national totals of 190,000 dead in England and 60,000 in Scotland. This atlas records the combined total, 250,000, as the sum of those two national figures rather than a number Carlton himself states as one lump total; his own much larger estimate for Ireland is recorded separately as the upper figure below. Death TollCarlton's original combined total across England, Scotland and Ireland adds his own Irish estimate, 618,000 dead, drawn from the seventeenth century surveyor William Petty's contemporary reckoning, and is the figure most widely reproduced from his study. Carlton's own later work revised the English and Scottish totals upward while revising the Irish figure down after other historians judged the original estimate too high, so this remains the widely cited figure rather than a settled one. Disputed
Religious DimensionWhether the war was fundamentally religious remains argued: Morrill reads it as the last of Europe's wars of religion, moved by the Laudian ceremonies and the prayer book, while an older constitutional and a Marxist social reading each place religion downstream of politics or class 1 Morrill's religious reading, the constitutional reading descending from Gardiner, and the social reading associated with Hill are three live and named positions in the historiography of the period. The war's own immediate origin favors Morrill's case: armed Scottish resistance to an imposed prayer book escalated directly into the crisis that produced the fighting, King Charles's own church policy was the proximate grievance, and the war's outcome brought a decade of the widest religious liberty England had known before the Restoration reversed it by ejecting nonconforming ministers. On that reading, this war's basic cause and its basic outcome were both religious rather than religion merely accompanying an otherwise ordinary campaign, so this atlas records a death toll and period dates for it, while Gardiner's and Hill's readings, which place religion downstream of constitutional or social causes, remain live alternatives that would not reach the same conclusion. The Event
When It HappenedFighting from 1642 to 1651, within a wider crisis that began with the Scottish prayer book riots of 1637 and closed with the Restoration of 1660 1 Principal PartiesCharles I and the royalist party against the Long Parliament and its New Model Army, with the Scottish Covenanters and the Irish Confederation as parties in their own right 1 Learn More
Bishops, the Prayer Book and the Road to War
The crisis began over a book of worship. Charles I and his archbishop, William Laud, pursued a programme of beauty in holiness that moved communion tables back to the east end behind rails, restored ceremony, and to many of the king's subjects looked like a road back to Rome. In 1637 the attempt to impose a new prayer book on Scotland produced riots in Edinburgh, the National Covenant of 1638, and two wars the king could not pay for, which forced him to recall the parliament he had ruled without for eleven years.
That parliament put Laud in the Tower, and by 1641 was debating whether to pull episcopacy up root and branch. John Morrill's work on the origins of the fighting argues that religion, more than taxation or constitutional principle, is what moved ordinary people to take up arms in 1642, and that the English Civil War is best understood as the last of Europe's wars of religion rather than the first of its modern revolutions.
Parliament won the argument as well as the war. The Westminster Assembly met from 1643, episcopacy was abolished in 1646, the Book of Common Prayer was replaced in 1645 by a Directory of Public Worship without set prayers, Christmas and the other feasts were suppressed as unscriptural, and on 30 January 1649 the king was tried and beheaded in front of his own banqueting house.
The World Turned Upside Down
When the bishops fell, so did the licensing of the press, and England spent two decades in an argument that no authority could close. Christopher Hill's history of the period gathered the movements that filled the gap: Baptists insisting on believers' baptism and gathered congregations; Levellers arguing for a franchise reaching to the poorest he that is in England; Diggers digging the common land at St George's Hill in 1649 on the argument that the earth was a common treasury; Ranters accused of holding that to the pure all things are pure; Fifth Monarchists reading Daniel and expecting the reign of Christ within the decade; and, from 1652, the Quakers, whose founder George Fox preached an inward light needing neither clergy nor steeple house and whose members went to prison in thousands for refusing oaths and hat honour.
The republic was more tolerant than anything before it and less tolerant than its radicals wanted. Cromwell's regime protected gathered churches, permitted Jews to return to England in 1656 after three and a half centuries of exclusion, and still passed a Blasphemy Act in 1650 and hounded the Quaker James Nayler for riding into Bristol as Christ had ridden into Jerusalem.
The Restoration of 1660 shut the opening. The Act of Uniformity of 1662 ejected some two thousand ministers who would not conform, and English Protestantism was permanently divided between church and dissent.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Laud's ceremonial programme in the Church of England provoked the crisis, and episcopacy was abolished in 1646 and restored in 1660.
George Fox began preaching the inward light in the early 1650s, in the opening the war had made.
The Westminster Assembly of 1643 produced a Presbyterian settlement and the Directory of Public Worship, and the Scottish Covenanters fought for it.
The Quakers emerged from 1652 in the freedom that followed the collapse of press licensing, and thousands were imprisoned for refusing oaths and hat honour.
Fought across England, Scotland and Ireland; the Restoration settlement of 1662 divided English Protestantism permanently between church and dissent.
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