‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and Scotland during the 1640s and 1650s. While Britain lost 2.2 per cent of its population in the first world war, 4 per cent perished during these terrible 17th-century clashes.
The kingdoms were, at the outset, Charles I’s. At a time when even a great leader would have struggled to navigate the political, religious and social torrents confronting him, the king was weak and apt to act on the latest advice he received; his only strengths were piety, art patronage and being a loving husband and father. When a ruler of energy and charisma was desperately needed, Charles was happiest reading the Bible or playing chess or lawn bowls.
More important than his pastimes was his stubborn belief in the divine right of kings and his resentment of dissenting voices, which put him in direct conflict with powerful elements in the House of Commons. Equally dangerously, his rigid adherence to High Anglicanism, and his sympathy for his overtly Roman Catholic wife, drew the anger, fear and disgust of English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians. It was a time when competing pamphlets proliferated, spreading the blackest of propaganda. Wildly exaggerated reports of Catholic outrages in Ireland and Europe fuelled fear that England would soon be put to the sword by papists acting on behalf of the Antichrist.
After Charles urged his supporters to come to his aid in August 1642, many on both sides still longed for peace but were dragged into the conflict through varying concepts of honour, loyalty and Christianity. Others were seduced by the promise of plunder. The shocking bloodshed of the first major battle, Edgehill, in the autumn of that year was just the beginning of an orgy of suffering on English soil.
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