Review : Civil Wars of the Three Kingdoms

My quest to fill in the huge gap in my history knowledge concerning the Civil War has taken a enormous stride with the completion of Trevor Royle's mighty tome, Civil War : The Wars of the Three Kingdoms. This 800+ page epic is about as comprehensive as any popular reader like myself is ever going to want.

Previously, I've looked at the war tangentially with Witchfinders and The Ruin of All Witches, as well as more directly at the social side of things in The English Civil War, and in some detail to its aftermath in Providence Lost. But none of these much cover the military stuff, and trying to understand the impact of the war while neglecting the whole bit about tens of thousands of solider lining up to shoot each other feels like something of a rookie mistake.

Civil War makes amends for this in abundance. As both a military and political history it's almost outrageously thorough, to the point where I decided I needed a bit of a break and treated myself to the hardback illustrated version of The Hobbit by way of diversion. Not because I was bored, just because I needed to read something else for a bit. Then I plunged right back in. Civil War is a book which demands your immersion and requires a great deal of time, but it is, I think, well worth it.

The Review Bit 

It's almost impossible to write 800 pages of perfection so let me start with the negatives. There aren't many of these and they're all really quite minor : there's the occasional apparent contradiction*, especially near the start but this seems to fade as the book progresses; though very possibly I just needed time to get used to Royle's writing style. Conversely, there are two stock phrases he repeats, "the times were out of joint" and "would not have been human" which get used ever more frequently towards the end.

* E.g. why should Charles' marriage be considered to be lacking in passion because he didn't have a mistress ? I would have thought the exact opposite ! Likewise someone being described as both "young" and "in middle" life; various other minor things like this.

There are two somewhat more substantial difficulties. First, he doesn't give much in the way of physical descriptions of anything, be that persons or landscapes (at least nothing beyond the most superficial, e.g. the hill was tall and steep), or indeed the capabilities of the military hardware used at the time. This isn't a big deal but it would have enhanced the book to have more of this. Second, a more problematic omission is the lack of a list of cast of characters. With such a necessarily enormous number of protagonists, it's inevitable that it becomes difficult to remember who everyone is, regardless of the quality of the writing*.

* Though it's still not anywhere near the complexity of the Wars of the Roses.

Like many authors, Royle makes the mistake of naming people who really don't need to be named, which makes me try and keep them all in my head when honestly most of them aren't worth it since they only make an appearance for a page or two. Similarly, because the narrative is generally large-scale and political, sometimes individual characters become extremely important but only for a little while, and then the focus moves elsewhere and by the time they re-emerge I've completely forgotten who they are.

Against this, the major narrative is extremely well-written. Royle is adept at knowing when to divert into interesting anecdotes and never dwells excessively on them, always returning to the main theme promptly. In general the style is as clear as a book like this can ever hope to be, which is praise not to be dealt out casually. Chapters are short and focused so you always have a convenient break point, and there are no stupid "footnotes" at the back of the book you have to keep turning to.

But best of all, the balance between presenting the raw facts (as we know them) and the interpretation as to why events happened in the way they did, e.g. getting into the mindset of the various characters, trying to disentangle the major socio-political forces driving the events themselves, is just about perfect. Royle favours giving the facts and generally trying to let them speak for themselves, but provides in my opinion exactly the right amount of his own analysis to keep this interesting and provocative without forcing the book to support any particular agenda. And while it may not be quite the unputdownable page-turner that Dan Jones comparable-length The Plantagenets is, it's usually lively and interesting, occasionally thrilling, rarely dull, never tedious, and always commendably thorough. Managing this in a topic this complex and important is no small achievement.

All in all, the deficiencies are far outweighed by the positives. I'm going to give this one a very solid 8/10. It is, though, quite the tome, and a bit more descriptive, narrative zeal would have sealed it as an easy 9.

The summary bit

I kept overly-extensive notes on this, so much so that if I try and even summarise those, this post will end up unbearably long. So instead I'm just going to pick out the major themes which have stuck with me from memory, mainly things that were either new to me or which I happened to find particularly interesting for whatever reason. Forgive me, then, if I don't attempt a summary of the enormously complex character of Cromwell, but I think that if I were to begin such an undertaking, this post would never be finished. 

I should also note that Royle focuses on the military and political side of things, with not much said about the social aspect (for that, Purkiss' English Civil War is by design much better). The major exception is that he also gives a commendable coverage of the immediate aftermath, and though it's not of course as detailed as Lay's Providence Lost*, it's broader in scope and better describes the context needed to understand the consequences of the conflict.

* Royle only mentions Providence Island in one brief passing sentence; Lay used this for a whole series of chapters and those were by far his worst.

Reasons for the war

Unlike both Purkiss and Lay, Royle sticks closer to the line oft told to children and tourists : that the war was primarily fought for political reasons, rather than being a religious problem that bled out into politics. Sometimes he's quite explicit about that, though he does always acknowledge the heavy religious dimension which the children and tourists are basically never told at all. 

Rather than ignore it completely, Royle simply reverses the priorities compared to the other authors. In his view, it seems that the political tensions provoked the religious disagreements which in turn eventually got everyone so cross that they just had to have a jolly good fight to sort it all out, instead of being the other way around.

Reading between the lines a little, while Purkiss takes the fact that there were abject religious dimensions to the start of the war, Royle would probably say that this too shallow a reading of events, and that this aspect was just a manifestation of the political tensions that had been festering for years : had Charles had the political acumen to better deal with the problems, the differences of faith could very possibly have been accommodated harmoniously. No, in Royle's view it's very much politics which is the root cause here, not a matter of spiritual ideology.

In my totally unqualified judgement this rings true. The religious disputes were all about such utterly trivial minutiae that anyone with any real political acumen ought to have been able to deal with them without difficulty. Unfortunately Charles had precious little of this; his tendency towards political differences and power struggles was to either suppress or ignore them. Still, the bigger lesson for me remains that religion did play a major role here. It definitely was a factor in itself, if only partly independent of the political disputes in play.

Civil/not civil

Newspapers are wont to proclaim the times as being of ever-increasing political polarisation, but I think it's vital to remember that this has always waxed and waned. Anyone saying that things are better or worse "than ever before" had better be aware that such claims are almost certainly no more than rhetorical hyperbole.

In the movie Cromwell, in one early engagement the two sides line up amicably for battle and refuse to start until the appointed time. Royle makes no mention of this specific event, but it's clear this does reflect a real sentiment of the day. While the two sides did of course go to war and were happy to shoot and stab each other to settle their disagreements, initially... there were rules. Captured leaders would be imprisoned and ransomed, or simply fined and released – or even forgiven entirely. Mercy and clemency were expected and received from both sides. Fleeing enemies were not cut down. Civilians were generally not involved. Reconciliation was possible between individuals who happened to find themselves on opposite sides; friends rent asunder could and did forgive each other, even simply agreeing to disagree while maintaining communication throughout the war. As one commander wrote to his opposing friend :

"Hostility itself cannot violate my friendship to your person... we are both upon the stage, and must act the parts assigned to us in this tragedy. Let us do it in a way of honour and without personal animosities".

This would seem to support Royle's assertion of a politically-driven conflict. That is, in a very literal sense, the primary disagreement was one of specific policy. It wasn't about an ideological world view, not a fundamental, identity or moral-based dispute. After all, it's much easier to forgive someone when they just disagree on the particulars of governmental structure than whether or not it's wrong to murder kittens. The propaganda may have been filled from the outset with high rhetoric, but the actions and communications of ordinary people caught up in the conflict tell a very different story. At least to begin with, at any rate.

In contrast to Purkiss, Royle's view of the war is one primarily of large-scale battles rather than individual disputes. The two views aren't mutually exclusive, however. Purkiss does seem to have neglected a lot of the set-piece battles*, as is quite proper for a social history. But Royle also makes it clear that the classical view of the war as brother-against-brother, fathers-against-sons, did occur, just not from the outset. Only as the conflict dragged on did all sides lose patience and resort to atrocities. By the end there was no question of chivalry or mercy; it became a violent bloodbath in which only might was right and the law was simply ignored, coming to a head, as it were**, with Charles.

* Royle appears to cover almost every single one of the many dozens of such large-scale actions that took place, of course in varying degrees of detail. Purkiss in my view unfairly downplays the importance of these, giving an impression that they were much less common than they actually were.
** Terrible pun intended.

The other very surprising thing I'd never heard of before, which I would never have guessed at, was that it became routine to sell captured soldiers into slavery. Yes, full-on slavery in the New World colonies. I don't think Royle gives the numbers (they may not even be known) but we're certainly talking thousands or more probably tens of thousands. And yes, of course, this pales in comparison to the later industrial-scale atrocity that was inflicted on non-European countries, but I find it remarkable that this is basically never mentioned at all. You just don't think of Englishmen selling fellow Englishmen into slavery. 

I would also have liked to learn more about "Captain Frances Dalziel, bastard daughter of the Earl or Carnwath, the commander of a troop of horsemen who rode under the banner of a black flag sporting a naked figure hanging from a gibbet". She sounds great.

Charles and Cromwell

Royle generally gives little (but not nothing) in the way of character analysis throughout, with the major exceptions (though there are others) of Cromwell and Charles. These are examined in vivid detail. What I found most surprising about Charles was that though often having the political decisiveness of a suicidal sheep, he was actually a perfectly able military commander. He took direct command of armies on several occasions and won victories in the field. He was also, even more surprisingly, a capable administrator too. In the period just before the war when he was ruling without Parliament. the country was getting along just fine, even being in outright prosperity, for some years. The problems came when he was unable to make a choice when both outcomes were disadvantageous, in which case he'd resort to delay, dissembling and flip-flopping. Basically he'd just fall apart and lie about the whole thing afterwards. He was incompetently duplicitous.

And the Cavaliers as a whole don't seem to have been particularly cavalier in the modern sense of the word. Sure, there was their dashing hero, the bold and decisive Prince Rupert, but apart from him ? Nah, not really. Again, in the main the generals were perfectly sensible, and even Rupert wasn't reckless. Bold and decisive he may have been, but he wasn't at all stupid; this was not an era of charging headlong into battle just because honour demanded it.

The other character I have to mention briefly is the tragic figure of Montrose. A singularly brilliant general who led Royalist forces in Scotland to victory after victory, his whole endeavour ultimately fell apart : with Scotland itself seemingly secure, the Scots simply refused to carry on the fight on English soil. Montrose could understand the military situation both strategically and tactically and bend it to his will, but politically... not so much. He doesn't seem to have grasped why the war was being fought or what the Scots were seeking, ultimately consigning him to the status of a mere footnote in history.

On Cromwell, I'm restricting myself to one specific topic here. For a while I've been wanting to understand just what it is about Cromwell that causes the Irish to hate him so, with many documentaries noting this but failing to mention what it was that Cromwell actually did. Royle at last redresses this. He hardly finds Cromwell to be the demon of Irish folklore, but all the same, he clearly did enough that you can understand how and why this perception has come to be the case.

Royle makes it clear that Ireland was treated differently throughout the whole campaign. As elsewhere, there was more at work than geography, making any maps of Royalist and Parliamentarian territories complicated and misleading, with no simple clear splits between the two. There were, in essence, supporters of both sides more or less everywhere, resulting in highly complex shifting allegiances and radically different Royalist treatment of both the Scots and the Irish depending on the circumstances : now unduly harsh, now bizarrely lenient; now people to be conquered, now a vital recruitment pool. Compounding all of this was that while the Royalists were generally Catholic and the Parliamentarians generally Protestant, there was by no means a perfect alignment here. 

But whereas Scotland was in the aftermath dealt with more or less as a full partner, Ireland was treated with oppression; it got none of the rewards that came from the ultimate political stability after the war but suffered even more harshly than other regions during the conflict. Irish causalities were much higher than in the other nations, and here Royle unfairly omits much discussion as to why this should be. He notes that many of the supposed atrocities committed by Cromwell are little more than provable fabrications... but all the same, the way in which Ireland was oppressed, particularly in how its land was divided, and... yeah, Royle presents more than enough to understand why Cromwell remains a figure of hate. One short passage will suffice :

Catholic families were transplanted from their lands in Ulster, Leinster and Munster because they were to be on the losing side and the winners, the English Protestants, had to be rewarded. In pursuit of that policy many thousands of Catholic Irish were also sold into slavery in the West Indies; some of these were vagrants from the main towns, but because women and children were included in their number it added to the feelings of persecution... Catholic worship was outlawed... up to 40,000 were banished.... The use of Irish Gaelic was also banned under earlier statutes and the net aim was to produce an anglicised Protestant society in which all traces of traditional Irish life would eventually disappear.

The word "brutal" hardly feels unfair here. Purkiss to her shame doesn't mention this at all.

New Worlds

Americans love the Magna Carta for some reason, but the Baron's Revolt is hardly a watershed moment in British political history. Not so the Civil War. Here is something that feels like a fulcrum, a pivotal part of history around which the world turned. Here, set paradoxically against a background of slavery, were ideas of freedom and egalitarianism mingled with monarchy, magic and mysticism all mixed with science and empiricism, ancient despots giving way to the as-yet primitive power of the people. It's an astonishing period, the transition between the medieval and the modern, and we need a lot more dramas set in this period and for everyone to shut up about the bloody fucking boring Tudors*.

* I'm being rhetorical, but there are far too many dramas and documentaries alike about Henry VIII which add exactly nothing to the story; even Elizabeth I has been overdone. Conversely, nothing at all is even said about Henry VII (except in Shakespeare's Richard III play) or Bloody Mary.

Royle makes it clear that the Civil War was only one stage in the process, and that the full transition away from absolute monarchy was not really complete until the Glorious Revolution a few decades later. But it was still of profound importance. None of it happened by design. What began as a "crisis by monthly instalments" of a king profoundly lacking in self-awareness eventually allowed truly revolutionary ideals and ideas to flourish, but it wasn't those ideas themselves that initially drove anyone.

The ideas which did emerge, however, are sometimes strikingly similar to modern positions. Here indeed is the birth of liberalism, with a pursuit of individual freedoms, income-based taxation, an insistence on Parliament to act as a safeguard for the safety and liberties of the people. At the Putney debates we see some hints of American ideals. Thomas Rainsborough :

"I think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he has not had a voice to put himself under."

Later, the Rump Parliament passed acts which Royle himself describes as "using language that presaged the birth of the United States of America a century later" :

That the people are, under God, the original of all just power : that the Commons of England, in Parliament assembled, being chosen by and representing the people, have the supreme power in this nation; that whatsoever is enacted or declared for law by the Commons in Parliament assembled, hath the force of law, and all the people of this nation are concluded thereby, although the consent and concurrence of the King or House of Peers be not had thereunto.

Other radicals were even more prescient, though distinctly un-American and far more of British liberal sensibilities, calling for the existence of a free health service. In 1649 ! Well, we had to wait a while...

Royle concludes with a brief, direct comparison with the Civil War and the War of Independence, going so far as to compare Washington and Cromwell. Both were real human beings, which means that neither can really be described as a hero or a villain in the truest sense, but people capable of heroics and villainy as the occasion demanded. Royle believes Cromwell was on the verge of accepting the crown when chance intervened to make it impossible; Washington would not have done so. Cromwell espoused liberal ideals (especially religious liberties, see Lay) but had no compunctions about persecuting the Irish or acting with flagrant hypocrisy as a tyrant when the situation turned against him; in America "emancipation did not extent to the black slaves, nor to the native Americans, and there was to be no tolerance for Loyalists... From that vantage point the struggle for freedom loses some of its gloss."

The only brief conclusion I will venture is that all these high-minded ideals were not the driving force of anything. Rather they emerged through bloody struggle and chance. It wasn't that someone decided one day that, "hang on a minute, having a ruler chosen by bloodline is no basis for a system of government" and then set out to overthrow the king. Instead this realisation dawned gradually on the battlefield in a war begun essentially by happenstance. Without a whole series of accidental mistakes, unfair oppression, and leaders at once perfectly able and catastrophically incapable of dealing with the situations put before them, these ideas would never have begun. With an able ruler, the ideas of egalitarianism would have languished in obscurity. 

It took the blood and muck of battle to bring the concept of equality into reality. These ideals were born in a very real world, not the ivory tower, and that means they were from their inception rife with implicit assumptions that some deserved more egalitarianism than others. Hypocrisy and inconsistency were rife. Instead of lamenting this, or cynically viewing these ideals as flawed, I think it speaks very strongly that there must be some fundamental truth behind them. What was found through harsh accident is, after all, still among our most cherished political principles, surviving uncounted upheavals and revolutions for more than three centuries. Like discovering penicillin, the role of accident doesn't mean it isn't true.