Anthony House
AP European History B
Mr. Hendricks
23 October 1998

The English Civil War and the Culture of the British Isles

At Elizabeth I’s death, England was a nation coming into its own among the powers of Europe. The Stuart dynasty ruled over a people intent on defining their own identity. James I, while never popular, survived his rule unscathed by Parliament; his son would not be so lucky. When Charles I was forced to call the Short Parliament in 1640, few, if any, could have imagined the bitter civil war that would soon engulf England. In the end, the English Civil war significantly affected both culture in England and the treatment of prisoners of war throughout the western world.

The English Civil War began slowly, tensions building for over two years before the outbreak of widespread armed conflict. As Charles I feuded at London with Parliament over constitutional supremacy, matters escalated quickly. It was not until 22 August 1642, however, the Charles officially declared war on Parliament. Propagandists went to work on each side, and there was widespread disagreement over who was to blame for the crisis. One thing was certain, however: the "vast majority of the English people" viewed the now imminent struggle with a mixture of dread and disgust (Durston 16). Many avoided taking action until the last possible moment, when demands were made by both sides for the loyalty of the English citizens. As the situation tensed, the England was forced to rethink her sense of self, and her subjects began question the basis of their English identity.

The search for a distinctly English identity was aided in large part by distinguishing the English from the Welsh and this Irish. Wales had never enjoyed favor with the English, yet by the end of the civil war, the Welsh would achieve an accord with England still unknown to the Irish. Before 1630s, Wales was viewed as a "territory in which the light of the Gospel had yet to shine" (Roberts 36). The relationship between the English and the Welsh, although less precarious than that of either Ireland or Scotland, was far from cordial. The Welsh, in fact, were seen as "ghastly brutes" by the parliamentary forces at the Battle of Naseby (Roberts 38). The first conciliatory steps were made in 1644, when the English Parliament sent two Puritan Preachers to minister to the Welsh. Relations between Wales and Parliament improved rapidly as the Welsh embraced Puritanism, and the Puritan church made great gains in Wales during the interregnum. Because of their newfound favor with the English, popular disavowal of Welsh culture waned by the mid-1640s. The Irish were not so lucky.

During the early 17^th century, the Irish had been looked on with no more (and probably less) disfavor than the Welsh. Whereas the Welsh were depicted as "thoroughly nasty and mean," the Irish were generally thought to be the victims of unfortunate circumstance, as "such ignorant papists that you would rather think them atheists or infidels" (Roberts 38; Noonan 156). Ireland was presented as a virtual Eden, and the failure of English policy in this Eden was blamed less on the barbarism of the Irish and more on the inefficient administration of England. The Irish rebellion of 1641, however, had a significant impact on popular sentiment. After the rebellion, as the Irish flooded into England, John Temple’s The Irish rebellion painted a picture of Irish that would remain dominant in English thought through the mid-19^th century. The Irish were distinguished ethnically from the English, and were given neither the aid of parochial welfare nor the dignities allotted to English prisoners of war. This view of the Irish cemented the English sense of superiority within the British Isles that slandered the Irish for over two centuries.

Surprisingly, the Irish weren’t the only group for whom the English Civil war was, in the long term, detrimental. For women, too, the revolution did more harm than good. Most contemporary records of the effects of the war on English women focus on either women serving in the military or the cause of noblewomen in the war. In the case of the former, a disproportionately large number of stories depict women disguising themselves as men. For the latter, who protected their husbands’ castles from siege, the number of castles with absentee landlords limited the role of the noblewomen in the war. For the most part then, there is evidence to suggest that women during the war were limited to occupations in agriculture or in providing goods and services to armies passing through the area (for there was not a large camp following of armies during the English Civil War.) A significant number of women also petitioned for pensions for both veterans and widows; this, however, was regarded with general mistrust by the men of the age. In the end, "there seems . . . to have been a reaction against women’s participation" in public life (Laurence 25).

Perhaps the most lasting affect of the English Civil War on western civilization, however, was the development of a humane precedent for treatment of prisoners of war. Before the English Revolution, "regulation of prisoners . . . was a form of property law" (Donagan 28). With this conflict, though, treatment of captives shifted from a property-based standpoint to a dignity-based one. The lack of codified standards was, no doubt, detrimental to the full actualization of the optimistic regulations on the treatment of prisoners, but on the whole the treatment of prisoners of war improved dramatically as a result of the English Civil War. The humane treatment of prisoners, however, presented new questions to the captors, since those taken were now considered the charge of the army as a whole rather than of the individual soldier. Shortages of facilities and rations mandated near immediate release, often after an oath of pacifism was drawn from the captive. At other times, groups of officers were collected, and individual trades were made. All this was new to warfare in Europe, and it would affect the formation of a written code concerning prisoners during the American Civil War. In the end, the manner in which the armies of the English Revolution addressed the issue of prisoners of war left a legacy that is still alive today, and may be its greatest contribution to modern society (besides the whole issue of constitutionalism.)

In general then, the English Civil War affected not only the culture of England and the British Isles, but also the development of modern warfare. The political results of the war (namely, Cromwell’s republic) eventually gave way to the restoration of the Stuart monarchy. Eventually, though, the English would have a strong enough sense of identity to effect the Glorious Revolution—once again ridding England of the Stuarts . . . for good this time. Elizabeth would have been proud.

Works Cited

Donavan, Barbara. "Prisoners in the English Civil War." History Today 41.3 (1991): 28-35.

As recently as a century before the English Civil War the basic nature of conflict was entrepreneurial, and prisoners of war were treated as forms of property. With the advent of civil war, however, English perspectives on prisoners drastically changed. Both parliamentary and royal forces accepted, to a certain extent, standards for the treatment of captives that were based mainly on Christian moral grounds. The opposing sides both accepted the principle that "the life of a soldier who surrendered . . . was safe" (29). That is, of course, unless the soldier was a traitor (or, if captured by parliamentary forces, Irish.) This ideological respect for the rights of prisoners, however, was not practiced universally—some prisoners were killed nonetheless. Prisoners who survived capture presented a new set of problems to their captors. Since there weren’t adequate facilities or rations for the prisoners, the grand majority were dismissed "upon oath," meaning they swore to never again take up arms against their captors. Others were traded, with both factions keeping close watch to assure that no one gained the upper hand. The lack of codified guidelines for the treatment of prisoners, atrocity was not uncommon, but the mindset or fair treatment of captives was taking hold within England—whence it would develop over the next three centuries.

Durston, Christopher. "Phoney War—England, Summer 1642." History Today 42.6 (1992): 13-19.

As 1642 dawned on England, it dawned on a nation at the brink of civil war. At London, the king fought with Parliament for constitutional supremacy while the English countryside became accustomed to sporadic fighting between opposing factions. The political crisis faced in the summer of 1642 had been building steadily over the previous eighteen months, marked by increasingly open hostility between the Crown and Parliament. By early summer, some sort of large-scale armed conflict looked inevitable. There was widespread disbelief among the English about the circumstances in which they found themselves, and a lack of firm information and broad use of propaganda by both factions fostered belligerent divisiveness throughout England. While a small number of ideological individuals on either side openly expressed eagerness for the outbreak of war, the grand majority of the population viewed the onset of the war with dread, and most individuals either remained neutral or delayed taking action until the last possible moment. For many, the hour of reckoning came in mid-summer when they received demands for military service from both parliament and the king. Due to the structure of the war, "every county had a civil war more or less within itself" (17). The gentry and aristocracy began to see the gradual breakdown of the traditional social order, and normal relationships began to be disrupted by ideological divisions. In the end, the summer of 1642 presented itself as an early indication of the years of civil war to come.

Laurence, Anne. "Women’s work and the English Civil War." History Today 42.6 (1992): 20-25.

The popular press of England during the Civil War drew great attention to the role of women within the context of the war itself—especially those of the upper social spheres—but there is stronger evidence pointing to the ways in which the war affected women’s work for the population in general. Women such as Brilliana, Lady Harley of Brampton, were well known for defending their husbands’ castles while the men were away at war. There are also documents of both royal and parliamentary forces recording cases of women disguising themselves as men. Still, these two experiences were relatively rare when compared to the experiences of the average woman during the English Civil War. Evidence suggests that, for the most part, Englishwomen during this period did little camp-following or nursing of soldiers, and only limited suggestion that the dwindling male workforce allowed women of the day to step out of their traditional social sphere. While women worked steadily petitioning for pensions for both veterans and widows and often providing goods and services to the armies, in the long term, "the English Civil War limited, rather than expanded, the opportunities open to them" (25).

Lindley, Keith. "Whitechapel independents and the English Revolution." The Historical Journal 41.1 (1998): 283-291.

The parish at Whitechapel, a London suburb, was neither the wealthiest nor the most radical during the period between 1640 and 1662, but the Independent members of the parish were some of the most influential during the English Civil war. The three leading figures among the Whitechapel Independents were Richard Loton, William Townsend, and Peter Gale. All three served on the militant Tower Hamlets committee, influencing both parochial elections and the House of Commons (if such a thing needed to be done) to further their own cause. Fiercely parliamentary, the Tower Hamlets committee readily alienated a large portion of Whitechapel parishioners early in the war by pressing them to serve in anti-royalist forces "in the name of king and parliament" (285). A number of parochial Independents sustained their prominence, serving the Nominated Assembly until its dissolution in 1653 and (at that point) petitioning Cromwell for its recall. In the end, though, the Independent congregation at Whitechapel (just as that of England as a whole) was not able to survive the Stuart Restoration, but it left a legacy of sociopolitical liberalism that became one of Whitechapel’s distinguishing characteristics over the next 250 years.

Noonan, Kathleen N. "‘The Cruell Pressure of an Enraged, Barbarous People’: Irish and English Identity in Seventeenth-Century Policy and Propaganda." The Historical Journal 41.1 (1998): 151-177.

Irish refugees fleeing their homeland descended on London en masse as the English Civil War "resurrected questions of what it meant to be English" (152). Many English found the answers to those questions in differentiating themselves from the new immigrants. For the most part, earlier English discussions of Ireland and its people stressed England’s superiority while acknowledging the virtues of certain aspects of Ireland’s environs and population. Contemporaries, however, led by John Temple and his The Irish Rebellion promulgated the notion of the Irish as a barbaric, monstrous, and irredeemable group. Reprinted ten times over the next two hundred years, Temple’s treatise served as the basis of popular British sentiment towards the Irish for nearly two and a half centuries. Temple’s puritan sympathies shine through his work, which debases both Irish religion and ethnicity and stresses their inferiority to the English. Moreover, Temple makes blatant use of propaganda to tie treachery in the Irish rebellion to royal deceit and to formulate an English identity independent of the monarchy.

Roberts, Stephen. "Welsh Puritanism in the Interregnum." History Today 41.3 (1991): 36-41.

As late as 1640, Wales was regarded by the English as a "territory in which the light of the Gospel had yet to shine" (36). Welsh members of royal forces at the battle of Naseby did little to further the Welsh position within the British Isles and elicited the derision of the parliamentary forces. Early on in the war, in fact, Parliament had begun to subdue South Wales—although Wales still became a locus for the abortive second civil war in 1648. The great turning point for popular English sentiment toward the Welsh was the dispatch of two Puritan preachers by parliament to Wales in 1644. Those two were followed by a third in 1648 and the three gained notoriety through their successful ministry to the Welsh. After January 1649 and the execution of Charles I, the Dominion of Wales became surprisingly important in national politics. The free and rapid extension of English culture into Wales (foiled by England’s continued abhorrence of the Irish) welded the two peoples more closely together than any other dominions of the British Isles.