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    The English Civil Wars were a series of conflicts which were fought in England and Britain between 1642 and 1652. They were part of the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms which gripped the Stuart kingdoms in Britain and Ireland between 1639 and 1653. These also included the Confederate War in Ireland (1641–53) and the Bishops’ Wars in Scotland in 1639 and 1640. The causes of these wars were complex and differed from country to country. The English Civil Wars were specifically fought between the English parliament and the crown owing to a range of political, religious and economic disagreements between the political community and King Charles I. The wars led to migration within Britain and Ireland and even across the Atlantic between Britain and its colonies on the North American seaboard. This migration occurred both during the Civil Wars and afterwards in the 1650s and 1660s.[1]

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    English Civil Wars chronology of eventsEnglish Civil Wars chronology of events

    King Charles I

    The English Civil Wars had their roots in a number of political divisions which had emerged in the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland which were ruled by the House of Stuart following the accession of King James VI of Scotland as King James I of England in 1603. James’s son, who succeeded him as King Charles I in 1625, aspired to be an absolutist monarch who could rule his kingdoms without consulting with parliament. This led him to dissolve parliament in 1629 in England and to not call a further one for over a decade, alienating much of the political community there in the process. To make matters worse the king’s religious policy, which was based around Arminianism, a moderate form of Protestantism which retained many trappings of Roman Catholicism, was extremely unpopular in both England and Scotland amongst the Puritan and Presbyterian Calvinists in both countries.[2]

    The wars began in Scotland in 1639 when Charles’s efforts to impose bishops who would follow his commands in governing the Scottish Kirk (church) was rejected by the Scottish lords, leading to the First Bishops’ War in 1639 and the Second Bishops’ War a year later. In order to tackle this problem in Scotland, Charles had no option but to assemble an English parliament for the first time since 1629 and request a financial subsidy from them, but the parliamentarians soon organized themselves in opposition to the crown, demanding religious, political and economic concessions from the crown in return for financing the war against the Scots. Then, to top matters, a revolt broke out amongst the Roman Catholics of Ireland in the late autumn of 1641, who viewed the political instability in Britain as an ideal opportunity to seize control of Ireland and reverse the plantations which had seen land transferred to English and Scottish Protestants there since the 1550s. Finally, the crisis morphed into outright civil war between Charles and the English Parliament in the autumn of 1642.[3]

    The wars would continue periodically for a decade. The First English Civil War lasted from 1642 to 1646 and was the most significant, followed by the brief-lived Second English Civil War of 1648. At the end of these Charles and the Royalists were defeated by the Parliamentarians, but when he refused to negotiate in good faith the leaders of parliament’s New Model Army, including Oliver Cromwell, decided to place Charles on trial and eventually had him executed in January 1649, establishing an English republic known as the Commonwealth thereafter. A Third English Civil War, primarily fought in Scotland as Charles’s son sought to reclaim his birthright followed in the early 1650s, while it took until 1653 for the rebellion in Ireland to be fully suppressed. Yet, the experiment in republican rule was brief and following Cromwell’s death in 1658, who had become the Lord Protector of the Commonwealth a few years earlier, the monarchy was restored under King Charles II in 1660.[4]

    Extent of migration associated with the English Civil WarsExtent of migration associated with the English Civil Wars

    Oliver Cromwell

    There was major migration attendant on the English Civil Wars and in the years that followed. Some of this involved the North American colonies where many English Puritans had migrated in the 1620s and 1630s in order to worship in freedom. Now in the 1640s thousands of these Puritans headed back across the Atlantic to take up arms as part of parliament’s struggle against King Charles.[5] On the Royalist side, while Charles I established his base in England in Oxford after London declared in support of parliament, his wife and much of the Royalist court headed for the queen’s homeland of France. In the course of the 1640s and 1650s thousands of Royalist supporters headed into exile on the continent, living in places like Paris, Bruges in the Spanish Netherlands and the Hague in the Dutch Republic where they coalesced around the figure of the future King Charles II.[6]

    The greatest migration of all, though, concerning the Wars of the Three Kingdoms occurred with regard to Ireland. The country was intensely divided in the 1640s between regions which were controlled by the Irish Confederates in the west of the country, the supporters of parliament in the north and the Royalists in Dublin and parts of the south. This led to people moving to various parts of the country depending on their political loyalties. However, all of this migration was dwarfed by what occurred in the 1650s. Following the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland between 1649 and 1653, a massive plantation of the island was undertaken, with upwards of 30% of all land across Ireland changing hands. New English and Scottish planters, many of them army officers who had served in the New Model Army, were given estates across the country, while Irish and Old English Catholics were forcibly transplanted into Connacht, the western province of the country.

    Demographic impact of the English Civil WarsDemographic impact of the English Civil Wars

    The demographic impact of the Wars of the Three Kingdoms was most keenly felt in Ireland. An enormous plantation was carried out here, with Irish lords and Old English landholders, the vast majority of which were Roman Catholics who had rebelled in 1641, dispossessed. Their lands were granted to a mix of Cromwellian army commanders and English investors who had financed parliament’s war with Charles and the suppression of the Confederate revolt in Ireland. The resulting Cromwellian plantations of the mid-1650s saw millions of acres of land planted and in the years that followed tens of thousands of English, Welsh and Scottish colonists arrived to take up estates and farms across the country.[7]

    Many of the Irish and Old English chose to abandon Ireland altogether and moved to France, Spain or Austria where they were able to worship in freedom. The legacy of these ‘wild geese’, as they were termed at the time, is still seen in countries like France today where major winemakers such as Michel-Lynch, for instance, are descendants of the Lynches of Galway who moved to the Bordeaux region in the early modern period, where they had pre-existing trade connections.[8] In Ireland itself, those who were dispossessed were forcibly transplanted into Connacht, the western province of the island. This would consequently remain the most Gaelicized province of Ireland for centuries to come and as late as the nineteenth century Irish remained the dominant language in the region.[9]

    See alsoSee also

    Explore more about the English Civil WarsExplore more about the English Civil Wars

    References

    1. ↑ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/the-english-civil-wars-history-and-stories/the-english-civil-wars/
    2. ↑ https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5143
    3. ↑ https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/learn/histories/the-english-civil-wars-history-and-stories/the-english-civil-wars/
    4. ↑ https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5143
    5. ↑ https://newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/1640s-more-people-left-new-england-than-arrived/
    6. ↑ https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-5144
    7. ↑ https://www.jstor.org/stable/40930363
    8. ↑ https://thisdayinwinehistory.com/the-wine-geese/
    9. ↑ https://downsurvey.tchpc.tcd.ie/history.html


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