On the 330th
anniversary of the Glorious Revolution -- the historical significance of the
English Civil War (Part Five)
By Mark
Wegierski
web posted April 23, 2018
All these
religious, dynastic, political, social, economic, and ethnic tensions flared
intensely into armed conflict in the English Civil War. The term
"English" is a bit misleading: although the primary focus of
operations was England proper (as well as Wales and Cornwall), Scotland was
also critical, and Cromwell, of course, extended major fighting to Ireland in
the aftermath of the Civil War itself. The personalities of the two main protagonists
were very different. Charles I was "a mild and placid King",
genuinely concerned about the shedding of brotherly blood, with a somewhat
quixotic aspect, and a strong streak of pessimism. (Even in his time, the
Stuarts were often considered an ill-starred or unlucky dynasty.) This made him
a rather poor politician and military leader, given to preferring gestures of
principle to substantive political advantage. There were, for example, his
pathetic and futile gestures to curry favor with his executioner. In fact, he
went to his execution with the belief that the revulsion it would cause would
result in the almost-instantaneous restoration of the monarchy in the person of
his son, Charles II. Cromwell, by contrast, was generally able to see to the essence
of the matter, utterly convinced of his rightness, never wavering and ruthless
in political struggle. He understood the need for a well-drilled, professional
force to win the war, and formed the New Model Army as his personal instrument.
There has been some debate about the character of the New Model Army: were they
really "true believers", fanatically-enthused Puritans, or rather
well-drilled and disciplined professional mercenaries, assured of more regular
pay than any other force in the war? The heroic but impetuous Cavaliers were no
match for the iron drill and discipline of the New Model Army.
Cromwell is probably the foremost architect of
the new English state and cultural identity (which appropriated the term
"British"). After he had won the war in England, with the support of
London, the merchants, the haute-aristocracy, etc., he pushed all these social
sectors aside and ruled as Lord Protector (from 1653) through the New Model
Army and the very small, ultra-Puritan sector of society. In 1649, he crossed
over to Ireland, to begin probably the most vicious anti-Irish war ever waged.
After the virtually complete confiscation of Irish Catholic landed property, he
proposed confining Irish Catholics to a small, barren reservation in the west
part of Ireland which would, furthermore, be completely cut off from the sea,
by a ten-mile-wide coastal zone to be settled by Protestants. Such arrangements
bear comparison to those carried out by the totalitarian regimes of the Twentieth
Century. In 1650-1651, all of Scotland was crushed and brought under
Cromwellian rule. It is not difficult to see in Cromwell's regime a prefiguring
of the modern totalitarianism of the twentieth century, while Charles I's
stance can be seen as the doomed, "authoritarian" resistance of a
premodern type of regime.
Cromwell's
regime then scored brilliant military victories against the Dutch (commercial
rivals) and the Spanish. The punctilious Puritan social regime (cutting down
the maypoles, banning Christmas, banning the theatre, the supervision of public
behavior in minute detail, etc.) was then carried out, against an increasingly
recalcitrant but helpless population.
The
Cromwellian period was short but extremely critical for the history of the
British Isles. For the first time in centuries, the entire territory of the
British Isles was united de facto in
the hands of a single man. This unification was effected, however, not by a
traditional monarch, but by a revolutionary warlord whose supporters numbered a
miniscule fraction of the British Isles' population, organized in a
revolutionary vanguard. In England itself, if not in Scotland and Ireland,
Cromwell was able to carry out long-lasting, profound, and possibly decisive
social and political transformations. The effect of the execution of King
Charles I (in 1649) on the collective identity of the English at the time,
cannot be underestimated. It undermined, in an ultimate sense, whatever shards
of belief had remained in the King's supreme place and unassailability in English
society. Even when restored, the monarchy had been fatally weakened, in
spiritual and also practical terms. (Virtually none of the Crown lands lost
were returned to Charles II.) Much of England, swelling with patriotic pride at
Cromwell's great victories over the Dutch and Spanish, moved in defining itself
away from an implicitly Royalist to an implicitly Parliamentarian position.
England would thus generally become in the future the base and touchstone on
which the new English society (called British) would be built, and then extend
itself into the entire British Isles, first crushing and then co-opting the
Scots, and continually occupying and exploiting Ireland. Earlier illustrious
figures in the history of the British Isles, notably Shakespeare, were dragooned
into this new English myth, despite the obviously royalist, aristocratic, and
anti-mercantile predilections evident in his famous plays and other works. In Richard II, the removal of the
ineffectual, sometimes cruel, but legitimate sovereign, who is replaced by the
energetic Henry Bolingbroke (Henry IV), leads to ongoing disaster for the
kingdom. To Shakespeare, the execution of a monarch by a revolutionary cabal
claiming to represent the people, carried out in the name of their
"rights", would have been seen as an unspeakable, if not almost
inconceivable, crime.
To be
continued.
Mark Wegierski is a Canadian writer and historical
researcher.