Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit 2. The English Civil War: Roundheads vs Cavaliers About this episode Episode 2/2. In 1642, England was torn apart by a fierce struggle. Royalist armies, loyal to the defiant King Charles I, clashed with the forces of Parliament, igniting a violent civil war that would decide the fate of the monarchy and the nation. In this second episode, we hear about some of the bloodiest battles between Roundheads and Cavaliers, the leaders who came to the fore during these trying years and how the two sides eventually arrived at a shaky truce.
For this, Dan is joined by Minoo Dinshaw, author of 'Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War'. He explains this tumultuous period from the perspective of Bulstrode Whitelocke and Edward Hyde, two close friends who reluctantly found themselves on opposing sides of the conflict that split England in two.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Max Carrey.
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1:24 Dan Snow? Welcome back everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This is episode two of our two-part series on the First English Civil War. So please do not listen to this one first, go back in your feed and find episode one. It really will be more enjoyable if you listen to it chronologically. In this episode, we've got to the point of conflict. We're now going to follow that war as it raged across Britain. The drama and intrigue of Britain's per capita bloodiest conflict in its history. In episode one earlier this week, we looked at how the civil war happened. But in this second and final episode, we'll be looking at how it all went down, talking about some of the biggest battles ever to take place on English soil, and about some
2:07 Dan Snow? of the political machinations that sought to bring that war to an end.
2:13 Dan Snow? Joining us again is the fantastic Manu Dinshaw. He's author of Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. He's written this great book about two friends who joined opposing sides in the war, and then tried to work to bring the two sides close together, to bring the country back to peace. We'll be hearing all about them, and whether they succeeded or not, and the role they played in bringing that war to a conclusion. I thought it was a really nice lens through which to look at the wider story of the war. This series was a request from our listener, Sarah Wright, so thank you, Sarah, for reaching out. Everyone else, please keep sending in your suggestions. You can find all the details in the notes of the podcast, and one day, you too might send in an idea that becomes an episode of the podcast. But for now, here's our second episode on the Civil War. Enjoy.
3:19 Dan Snow? Hello, Manu. Welcome back to the podcast.
3:21 Speaker 02 Thank you.
3:22 Dan Snow? We are in the autumn, the fall of 1642, and fall is a particularly apt noun for what is going on. Are lots of people just trying to quietly ignore the fact that the king's marching about trying to apprehend a few parliamentarians? Or is there genuine division and schism right across the kingdom of people going after each other?
3:43 Speaker 02 I think the majority of the country of England at this point would be relatively untouched but extremely afraid, and of course, our two main characters are too intimately involved.
3:56 Dan Snow? Now that war has broken out, are they interested in a compromise peace? Are they interested in like a Carthaginian peace? What do people at Hyde think is the best way to get through this?
4:06 Speaker 02 Both Hyde and Whitlock want, and for many years continue to want, peace, a compromise, a gentlemanly agreement. Hyde, and certainly his friend Falkland, would be horrified to see an outright victory by the king, because that would mean the triumph of the Queen, of some of the most aggressive Catholic courtiers, not their sort of people at all. They are bent on working something out, still. And Whitlock, for his part, has chosen to stay with Parliament because he thinks he can be a good influence for peace within that assembly too, and emerges as a consistent and very hard-working leader of the Commons Peace Party.
4:45 Dan Snow? Interestingly, they're on different sides, but they've probably got more in common with each other than they do with some of the extremists on either their flank, on the same side as them.
4:53 Speaker 02 Absolutely, that's something you see. Although, I do think one particularly delicious paradox in the campaign that autumn is that at times it's Whitlock who sounds more like an extreme royalist, because what he wants to see is victory by one side or the other. It doesn't really matter to him initially, as long as the war can end. And you almost see more approval from Whitlock, for instance, of the strategy, the aggressive strategy and tactics of a figure like Prince Rupert, than you do from Hyde, who of course has to put up with Prince Rupert's maddening company and detest him in a sort of intimate, approximate fashion. To Whitlock initially, Rupert is possibly the answer, or is a solution.
5:36 Speaker 02 That does change, though, when Prince Rupert burns down and sacks Whitlock's favoured country seat.
5:43 Dan Snow? Okay, I'm going to interrupt Minoo here, because we're almost at the point of the first major battle of the civil wars. Before we get into that, I just want to give a bit more detail about one of the most extraordinary characters of the civil war, somebody who's just been mentioned, Prince Rupert. He was Prince Rupert of the Rhine, which is a very cool title. A talented cavalry officer who rose to prominence as the senior royalist commander during the civil wars. By the time those civil wars break out, he's in his very early twenties, but he's done plenty of fighting already. He's cut his teeth, such was the nature of Europe at the time. He's really been fighting since he was a kid, just one of the many whose lives were consumed by the military upheavals of the religious wars, the massive violence of 17th
6:27 Dan Snow? century in Europe. He fought for the Protestant Dutch as they attempted to win their independence from the Catholic Spanish overlords. He participated right at the very end of an 80-year-long struggle in which the Dutch were eventually successful. And then he neatly segued into another enormous, even greater struggle, the Thirty Years' War, in which various European powers fought each other for a galaxy of religious and political reasons, which I cannot go into here. An appalling war, a war that actually started with the expulsion of his royal parents. They were deposed from their kingdom by the Habsburgs. They went to live in exile in Holland. As a child, his mum, as an exile in Holland, ignored him, but she apparently preferred the company of her pet monkey.
7:12 Dan Snow? But he grew into being a dashing, impulsive, handsome, six-foot-four cavalryman, the absolute personification of the term cavalier. During the Thirty Years' War, he was captured in battle by the Austrians. He tried to escape, obviously. He seduced his jailer's daughter, obviously. He charmed the Habsburgs, with whom he hung out, and he hunted with them and discussed matters of religion and politics with them. He impressed them so much, they offered him a small German state and high command in their army if he converted to Catholicism and joined their side, but naturally he refused. Instead, he did secure his freedom by promising never to fight the Habsburgs again, and instead went to England, where there was plenty of fighting to be had.
7:51 Dan Snow? He was a favourite of his uncle, King Charles I, and in 1642, aged just 23, Charles made him commander of his cavalry. And he quickly went about, using his European experience, what he'd seen of war on the continent, to recruit and train a substantial force of men who would become known as the Cavaliers. It seemed like Charles's faith in his nephew was well-placed, because he came off the blocks hard and fast, Powick Bridge, the first military clash of the war, just south of Worcester, when he threw caution to the wind and galloped straight in at the parliamentarian force, utterly routing them, and really on that day... A legend was born. But his first great test, though, would be this first significant clash of the war at Edgehill.
8:36 Dan Snow? Edgehill was fought on October 23rd, late in the campaigning season in 1642, as the army, under Charles's personal command, marched down from the Midlands towards London, which was, as you've heard, the beating heart of the parliamentarian war effort. Blocking Charles's way, somewhere between Banbury and Warwick, roughly speaking, on the M40 today, as you're moving down from the Midlands towards London, was a force of just over 10,000 men, commanded by Robert de Vries, the Earl of Essex, and he determined that Charles would go no further. The battle began with an exchange of artillery fire, which, at this point of the war, was pretty inaccurate. Both sides had not yet developed the specialist skills and knowledge required to rain down devastating fire on the enemy. But it was Rupert who made the first big move.
9:18 Dan Snow? He and his royalist cavalry charged, and surprise, surprise, they drove the parliamentarian horse from the field, as they so often did. But then, as they often did, they went off looting and shooting to their hearts' content, rather than intervening decisively on the battlefield to kind of finish the job. Because by galloping away, they left their foot soldiers, their infantry, alone on the battlefield, and they were hard-pressed by the parliamentarians. And in the end, the royalists were actually pushed back. Charles's young sons, the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, both of whom, by the way, spoiler, would ascend to the throne of England, Scotland, Britain in time, as Charles II and James II, but they were almost captured in the fray. And it was only the very belated return of Prince Rupert to the battlefield that caused the parliamentarians to back off. And the two sides sort of withdrew to lick their wounds.
10:03 Dan Snow? It was effectively a stalemate. Around 3,000 men were killed or injured that day. That's over 10% of those who took part in the battle. So appalling casualty figures, a sense of what was to come in this long, savage war. And after both sides spent the night on the ground, a hard frost set in, a miserable night, the Earl of Essex decided that he would abandon the field the following day and head for Warwick Castle. So technically, it was a royalist victory, but it was certainly not a crushing one. And there were many lessons there to be drawn, if people cared to do so. The royalists, yes, they enjoyed an advantage, certainly in cavalry, but the parliamentary forces were fighting a lot more tenaciously, a lot more effectively, than their royalist enemies had assumed they would.
10:48 Dan Snow? Let's go back to Mino now, he's going to tell me about the consequences of this battle, how it changed the course, it guided the course of the civil wars. I'm always so struck by this battle because you've got the Earl of Essex, who we mentioned in the previous episode, that time he was fighting for the king. He's leading parliamentarian forces. If he'd been decisively defeated and the king had swept aside his army and kept marching on London, would there have been a civil war? This had been known as the Earl of Essex revolt and it would have just been almost forgotten.
11:16 Speaker 02 That's certainly how Charles wanted to see it. There's a fascinating moment when Charles pauses at an old Essex property, I believe it's called Chartley, and he gives out declarations referring to an Essex revolt. The coincidence that Essex's father was a rebel against Elizabeth is a useful one that the royalists tried to exploit. Of course, it couldn't be further from the truth. We're not talking about a dynastic squabble here, we're talking about a battle of ideas.
11:41 Dan Snow? Yes, so in fact, this battle of Edgehill, even if it had gone the king's way, these are ideas that are deep rooted enough not to be able to stamp out with one great victory. This is already looking like an intractable ideological war.
11:54 Speaker 02 Yes, I think that the royalists did surprise the parliamentarians with their relative success early in the war, but I think it probably would have been difficult for the more bellicose royalists wanted to effect. People like Rupert initially, a total victory, a rapid total victory, capture of London and so on. I think that wouldn't have established a lasting consensus. What might, I think, have lasted more successfully is something envisaged by Hyde. Because the royalists did play a surprisingly strong game early on with a great victory by Rupert, a minor skirmish but great PR value at Poet Bridge, and then a winning draw
12:38 Speaker 02 at Edgehill and the occupation of Oxford, they were in a very good position to negotiate. And Hyde believes they threw it all away by, at Rupert's insistence, continuing to advance on London and exposing their position as much weaker than it had looked after Edgehill.
12:55 Dan Snow? And then Oxford is taken, so that's good. So, okay, so on Rupert's advice, they marched on. It's very exciting for me because I grew up very near Turnham Green in London, which is now just a suburb of West London. It feels like you're in central London virtually. You get as far as Turnham Green. And then what? There are parliamentary defences, the road is blocked and the King has to turn around and go back to Oxford.
13:16 Speaker 02 Yes, I find this campaign fascinating. There's sort of element of bluff and double think involved in the campaign after Edgehill, the psychology of it. I compare it to that moment in Twelfth Night where Viola, disguised as a man, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek are tricked into having a duel with each other. And they're both terrified of each other. And that's what the armies assembled at Turnham Green are like. The Parliament has the numbers, but not the equipment or the experience. Royalists have this fearsome reputation as a battle-winning machine and Prince Rupert, but they also don't have enough ammunition. And no one knows what would have happened. And again, the hints from Hyde and from the more peaceful advisers in the Royalist camp
13:59 Speaker 02 is that had the Royalists attacked, it would have been a disaster. Whereas the hints, of course, from the peace party in Parliament, people like Whitlock, are that had the Royalists attacked, it might have ended the war one way or the other. Whitlock, actually, having been angered by the sacking of his house, has an aggressive strategy for winning Turnham Green for Parliament, involving moving some troops in a flank manoeuvre through Acton, but is vetoed by some sort of hardened mercenaries who don't want to listen to an amateurish MP with his preting gentlemanly advice.
14:33 Dan Snow? Who among us would not start advocating flank moves in the event of a civil war? I mean, that's those armchair generals among us. I mean, that's the go-to move. Darling, you have to flank them, flank them. Right, so the King has retreated to Oxford. A bit embarrassing, if you're the King, you get turned around on the outskirts of your own capital city, you get turned around at Turnham Green by this army of amateurs who you despise, who you say ought not to wield power because they are grubby moneymen from the streets of London. Anyway, they've just been defeated by them. Where are we then in the winter, going through the winter and into the next year of 1643?
15:05 Speaker 02 Well, I wouldn't use the word defeat, I would use the word stalemate. Both sides have breathed in, breathed out and retreated from each other and hunkered down in their rival capitals. And they've decided to talk, and that's where we are. And I found the identity of the emissaries of Parliament fascinating. You have a lot of people related ideals or by friendship networks or both to one another and to the Royalists, peaceable people who know each other. I find it fascinating how at this late stage, there's so much social intercourse and there remains also social mixing in London, where after Edgehill, for a long time, Whitlock and his family are living as part of a majority Royalist household.
15:46 Speaker 02 They live in Ivy Lane, near the Savoy now, with a lawyer called Matthew Hale, a Royalist lawyer, and with Hyde's friend and distant relation Geoffrey Palmer, another Royalist lawyer. And if you were a Royalist who lived in London, you didn't have much option but to stay quiet. And I think what we can see from this is that Whitlock is still a profoundly divided and ideologically dilute man.
16:11 Dan Snow? And I'm sure true of many people.
16:14 Speaker 02 Absolutely. You often notice, for instance, prominent parliamentarians renting from Royalist landlords, which again feels like a bit of an insurance policy somehow. There's a great sense of parliamentarians trying to keep all their options open and of course, equivalents on the other side too.
16:32 Dan Snow? Let's talk about the strategy, the plan for sixteen forty-three. Who's trying to do what?
16:41 Speaker 02 Well, the Royalists at this point appear to have the upper hand and to be negotiating from a position of relative strength. And a very interesting elite deal emerges as a possibility in what's called the Treaty of Oxford, most importantly concerning one of the great nobles who supports Parliament, the Earl of Northumberland. Now, I have a lot of time for the idea that the parliamentarian cause was, among other things, a noble oligarchy. And Northumberland is perhaps the most important of these nobles and always the leader of the parliamentarian peace commissioners. Now, Northumberland wants something. He used to be Lord High Admiral of England. This office was taken away from him by Parliament and given to his cousin. He wants it back.
17:25 Speaker 02 And he pretty much tells the king via Hyde that if he got it back from the king, and of course it would be purely titular, at this point the navy obeys parliament, he would be willing to broker a peace on very reasonable terms and essentially to change sides. Hyde says, come on, Your Majesty, take this deal. But it turns out that this course is vetoed at a very high level indeed, that of the Queen, who has insisted on having a veto on any agreement whatsoever.
17:55 Dan Snow? And why is the Queen so hardline on this?
17:59 Speaker 02 Well, the Queen is a Catholic, she is brunch, she has little interest in the median body of opinions, she doesn't see any difference between the Church of England and hotter Protestantism. If it comes to a deal, in many ways she has more sympathy with the sort of hardline Puritan point of view. She can't understand people like Hyde preying on about old English traditions and mixed monarchy and watered down concepts of regality. She just sees that as lukewarm and unhelpful. Interestingly, the Queen and Whitlock have rather a good sort of social and aesthetic relationship on the few times they encounter each other.
18:42 Speaker 02 Whitlock is a considerable amateur musician and the Queen sees him as a stylish and almost Frenchified gentleman who she rather likes personally.
18:51 Dan Snow? God, so he's actually tolerable. So we've got 1643, the Percy family of Northumberland do their best to play the Game of Thrones, as they've done so many times in the past, but it looks so the war will go on. That that attempt to compromise fails. What's the king trying to do? Is he, at this point, he's not trying to march on London anymore, he's sort of marching about trying to bring the rest of the country under control.
19:12 Speaker 02 Yes, it's complicated and he changes his mind and listens first to one set of strategists and then to another. I think there are sort of broadly free parties increasingly. There's on the one hand Prince Rupert, who is a good soldier and wants to win battles, take towns without losing too many men. There's the Queen and her, the Queen by the way, has been in United Provinces, the modern Evelyns, briefly, pawning the Crown Jewels and raising money, but she returns. And the most sort of extreme voices, people like Lord Digby, not around her. And then there's the Royalist Peace Party, people like Hyde and Falkland. Now Falkland, Hyde's best friend apart from Whitlock, is involved in a decision, a sort of compromise strategy
19:55 Speaker 02 involving the siege of Gloucester, and it goes terribly wrong. It's one of several turning points that have been posited.
20:04 Dan Snow? Right, let's get back to the battlefield here. Let's work out what's happening. Quite a lot in sixteen forty-three, but not a decisive year, as you'll hear. Over in the east of England, well, an unknown member of the East Anglian Gentry was emerging as a highly efficient cavalry commander. His name, Oliver Cromwell. He was making life very difficult indeed for Royalists in the east of the country. But the Royalist gaze was primarily focused this year on the west. Wales was an important recruiting ground for the Royalist cause. It was also a conduit for troops coming over from Ireland to fight for Charles. And so to protect the Royalist position in the west and to protect those links with Ireland, the Royalists decided to secure Gloucester and Bristol. Those were the two main aims.
20:48 Dan Snow? So to really bed themselves in in the west of England. Prince Rupert led a large force from Oxford to Bristol, and by the middle of July, late July, he was leading close reconnoiscences of the city's defences. Bristol was the second city of England, hugely important, a great terminus for the Atlantic trade. Really overtaken Norwich in this early modern period as the great trading city of England, as the country switched its gaze from Europe to the Atlantic world. The city was well fortified, had an inner wall and an outer chain of more temporary defences thrown up, all of which have now been bulldozed and are gone sadly. But the parliamentarian commander just didn't have the manpower to garrison all of these
21:33 Dan Snow? fortifications. Rupert invested Bristol, as you might say, he sort of began the process of a formal siege, but siege warfare was slow and grinding, and it's not really Prince Rupert's vibe, as you might be able to tell. So, it's only a couple of days later, on the 26th of July, he attacked in force. He sort of blasted three columns from different angles into Bristol. The fighting was incredibly tough, the commanders of all three columns were killed, in fact. And two of the columns were successfully repulsed by the parliamentarians, but one did the job, one managed to batter its way into parliamentarian defences. And they managed to secure one of the gates of the city, they managed to open those gates, and the rest of the royalist force charged in. After hours of savage fighting, door to door, street to street, men killing, stabbing,
22:17 Dan Snow? shooting, not only combatants on the other side, but civilians as well, in the frenzy of war, the city fell to the royalists. But it had been a costly victory, in fact, many of the most experienced troops had been killed, many of the best officers had fallen. And Rupert now turned his gaze on Gloucester. He met up with King Charles there, and for about a month, between early August to early September, there was a prolonged siege. The parliamentarian commander at Gloucester, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Massey, definitely hadn't read the royalist script, he absolutely determined to fight the last man in the last round. In fact, he led regular raids out to disrupt the royalist line, to stop those siege works encroaching ever further towards the parliamentarian positions. He built anti-artillery defences, the kind of defences you see in Europe at the time,
23:01 Dan Snow? rather than big, thin, high walls like you get in a medieval castle, he built... Very thick but low-lying defences, which meant that Royalist cannonballs would bounce off harmlessly or simply penetrate into these big earth mounds but not through them. The Royalists were running out of gunpowders, they tried to undermine the defences, that means they'd dig tunnels beneath them, but those tunnels were regularly flooded. And the mining operations were harassed by countermines, other mines driven underground by defenders, terrible subterranean warfare. The parliamentarian defenders succeeded in their aim, which is delaying the enemy until they can be relieved. And in late August, a force under the Earl of Essex arrived from London. In early September, the Royalists clashed with the Earl of Essex, clashed with this
23:44 Dan Snow? relief force, but no decisive result was achieved. What was clear though is that that relief force meant that the siege couldn't go on, they were just too vulnerable now to the Earl of Essex and the defenders of Gloucester. And one last great blow came when the Royalists mined, that they'd been digging this great tunnel, they'd been digging under those defences, it was broken into and it was destroyed by parliamentarian countermines. The Royalists were forced to break off the siege and retreated. The year's campaigning almost at an end. So 1643 was kind of on as even really, the Royalists had failed to make good on their momentum after capturing Bristol, Gloucester would remain a parliamentarian stronghold for the rest of the war. And alongside that, the Royalist position in the east of England was under terrible strain. 1644 would be an interesting year.
24:29 Speaker 02 So Rupert succeeds in taking Bristol with heavy losses and then because of advice partly given by Falkland, they attempt to besiege Gloucester, thinking that the garrison commander will change sides. He absolutely doesn't. They don't even take Gloucester and they lose lots of men pointlessly. They have a military advantage and it becomes squandered. Perhaps inevitably, the most peaceful and civilised men do not always give the best tactical military advice.
24:54 Dan Snow? It's interesting that the siege of Gloucester there, because the Royalists, do they slightly despise parliamentarians as unwarlike, that they're not the great warrior elite of the kingdom? And yet, time and again, the parliamentarians do demonstrate they can hold out, they can cling on and survive and resist the Royalist war machine.
25:14 Speaker 02 Yes, I suppose there are a lot of unlikely resilient defences throughout the country on both sides. I don't think that parliamentarians have a monopoly on resilience, or indeed that the royalists have a monopoly on dash. Sir Thomas Fairfax himself is a renowned, extraordinary swift cavalry commander. But I suppose one thing about my perspective is that my two protagonists are both civilians. I mean, Whitlock fancies himself as a little bit of a soldier. Hyde absolutely knows he's not a soldier. The nearest he gets to battle is looking after the princes at Edge Hill. And they both hate war and want it to end. Hyde has a snappy phrase that "a true vision of hell is that of a kingdom at war." That's
25:55 Speaker 02 his definition of hell. So fundamentally, these are two people who hate battle. They don't really believe in its glamour, and they just want to stop this.
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27:49 Speaker 03 What started the Civil War? What ended the conflict in Vietnam? Who was Paul Revere? And did the Vikings ever reach America?
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28:43 Dan Snow? Is there something in that? When often hears expression, there's no war like a civil war, which I think is, I'm not sure historically stands up when you one look at the Mongol conquests or the Operation Barbarossa. But did they think at the time that there was something particular about the terrible nature of a civil war that turned families and friends on each other? And I suppose fighting then took place across communities, not just at one particular front line somewhere. Was that where there was there a sense of that?
29:08 Speaker 02 I think absolutely. I mean, there are so many cases of friends and family on opposite sides. The Earl of Denby was killed at Edge Hill while fighting against his own son, not personally, but they were on opposite sides with opposite bodies of cavalry. The younger Earl of Denby, a close friend of Hides before the war. Basically shuffles up to him during a later peace treaty and tells him about his level of regret about everything that's happened. And that's just one of many examples. There's a wonderful quotation by the Duke de Rohan, quoted by Whitlock, I think, that England is a great creature that can only be slain by itself. There's this idea that England, this for a long time uniquely peaceful, tranquil, blessed land, has become the means
29:52 Speaker 02 of its own destruction in a way that will delight France, Spain and the Pope.
29:56 Dan Snow? Interesting. Echoed in that later quote about America saying the same thing, the US, you know, there'll there'll never be a foreign army that will water its horse in the Mississippi, it will be at their own hand. That's fascinating. I suppose the other interesting about civil war is quite quickly, and we mentioned Rupert's immediate outsized influence on the royalist camp, quite quickly, the people that are good at war rise to the top. Is it people like Whitlock and Hyde, do they have to start contending with people who've been made by the war?
30:24 Speaker 02 I think both of them remain extremely important. For example, Hyde becomes Chancellor of the Exchequer and most of the royalist money raising techniques had to do with him. Often they're very difficult for him. For example, to engage in fundraising from Catholics. And he was a strong Church of England man, suspicious of both Rome and Geneva, of the Catholic Church and Puritan Low Church dissenters. For him, both of them intended to be enemies of the Crown. But he had to put that to one side and fundraise from Catholic nobility. Also, along with the financial authorities of Parliament, agreed to a punishing excise, the first in England, which he derially remarks in his history,
31:09 Speaker 02 both sides claimed was wartime expedients only, but wise men on both sides knew would never be repealed. Whitlock, for his part, remained mostly notable as the consistent leader of the peace party and the parliamentarian peace approaches. But he was also still a very eminent and important lawyer, and also known as a theological authority. So one of the things going on at this time was the Westminster Assembly, where the parliamentarians tried to thrash out some kind of remodeled state church. And Whitlock, as well as his and Hyde's old mentor, John Selden, were crucial in arguing for Erastian state church, one where the fanatics were under control by sensible, sober government men.
31:55 Dan Snow? What's not to like? Okay, so 1643 comes to an end. Who's got the upper hand by the end of 1643?
32:02 Speaker 02 By the end of 1643, I think, still pretty unclear. But certain royalist hopes have been snuffed out, in that this strange affair has taken place called Waller's Plot, in which the royalists hoped to win, having failed to negotiate the Treaty of Oxford, they proceed in a more sub rosa fashion. They hoped to switch London, to make use of the existing body of royalist opinion in London, and have London surrendered to them by subterfuge involving this poet called Waller. It all goes horribly wrong, and the result is a much firmer, more united parliamentarian London, and an oath called the Vow and Covenant,
32:43 Speaker 02 where the MPs all determined against such royalist and papistical advances. And so a figure like Whitlock finds this tragic, and takes the Vow and Covenant with extreme reluctance, but takes it nonetheless. In 1643, John Pym, for so long the effective leader of Parliament, dies, but not before playing a decisive role in the formation of an alliance between the Parliament of England and the rebels in Scotland, the Covenanters in Scotland, which is a formidable combination, one that the royalists will have much greater trouble defeating.
33:14 Dan Snow? Right, let's talk about 1644. Definitely a turning point in the Civil War. The situation for the king and the royalists just appeared to be deteriorating at the start of the year. Prince Rupert spends a lot of time charging around the country trying to recruit more men and just put out fires. The situation in the Midlands is bad. Royalist forces lost their key stronghold at Gainsborough. Further north, the royalists utterly failed in their attempt to capture Hull, and one, Oliver Cromwell, was very prominent in both those parliamentary successes. As I mentioned earlier, the situation in 1643 in the East Midlands, along the east of the country, was pretty dire. You have the royalists utterly humiliated as they attempted to capture Hull. Slightly further south, the royalists are driven out of Gainsborough, their stronghold in the East Midlands. Oliver Cromwell prominent
33:58 Dan Snow? in both of those parliamentary successes. And 1644 began with more trouble.
34:04 Dan Snow? For Charles's cause, and worryingly it was in the West as well. Nantwich in Cheshire in very early 1644. The Royalists were defeated and this completely derailed one of the main Royalist strategies, which was building up strength in the West, using troops coming from Ireland and using that as a springboard to further conquest. Now, that plan in the North West certainly had had come to nothing. Interestingly, defeated Royalist commanders were starting to defect the parliamentarian side, never a good sign. To make matters worse, the parliamentarians and their Scottish allies had formed a committee of both kingdoms, which is a sort of unified body to make the waging of war more efficient between the two allies. In January 1644, a Scottish army had crossed into Northern England and put the king's forces
34:49 Dan Snow? there on defensive. They laid siege to and would eventually capture Newcastle. Rupert responded by just throwing himself at everything. He's a whirling dervish of activity, dashes across the north of England trying to shore up the Royalist position. He moves into Lancashire, takes Liverpool, he sacks Bolton, many of its defenders, the terrible massacre there in Bolton where the Royalists took the city. And I think that reflects the fact the war's getting deeper, the war's getting grimmer. It's like a blood feud getting exacerbated, enmities are becoming irreconcilable. But in the spring Rupert felt the wind was at his back a little bit and he turned his attention to York, one of the great cities of England. It had been under siege by a Scottish and parliamentarian army since late April of 1644.
35:34 Dan Snow? It's of very real importance, but also symbolic importance. And Rupert decided to try and lift that siege. But Rupert's getting messages from King Charles, who's getting quite nervous down in the South. It's all very well gallivanting across the North of England if you lose the heartlands down in the South. And Charles orders Rupert that unless he can secure York very soon, he wants him to withdraw back down south towards Worcester to shore up the Royalist cause there. He didn't want this northern adventure risking the entire project. So Rupert's now in a rush, and when you're in rush, you make mistakes. As he approached York, the parliamentarian besieging force, they were thrilled, they were very happy to meet this Royalist army and hopefully defeat them in a field.
36:16 Dan Snow? Far more interesting to most soldiers than long, slow sieges is a day of decision on the battlefield. Route the enemy's field army and his strongholds, his castles, his force will fall to you inevitably. And so, on the morning of the 2nd of July, two very, very large armies met at Marston Moor outside York. It would be the largest battle of the Civil War, one of the largest ever fought on British soil. The Royalists had just under 20,000 men, they were outnumbered by the Scots and the parliamentarians who had more than 20,000. And strangely, it happened at dusk. Around 7pm, Parliament launched a surprise attack during a thunderstorm. Very bold decision, but it paid off. Oliver Cromwell, really for the first time, he routed the cavalry on the right flank of the Royalist army.
37:01 Dan Snow? Typically, you have infantry in the middle and cavalry on the other flank. So on the other flank, the Royalist cavalry did attack the Scottish infantry, but Cromwell kept hold of his victorious cavalry, galloped round to the other flank, and then attacked the Royalist cavalry on that flank too. It was a brilliant, brilliant example of command and control. He routed his opponents on that side of the battlefield too, so all of the Royalist cavalry have abandoned the field. And that gave the parliamentarians the overwhelming numbers and the focus to destroy what's left of the Royalist army, its infantry in the middle. After only a couple of hours of fighting, the parliamentarians had won a resounding victory. And you can see just what a victory it was by how uneven the casualty figures were.
37:42 Dan Snow? We think something like 5,000 Royalists were killed, wounded or captured, and only 300 or so parliamentarians. This battle really establishes Cromwell as a commander of the First Order, of the top rank. Rupert managed to flee, he managed to flee with around 6,000 men. I believe from memory that his beloved dog, Boy, was also killed on the battlefield. His dog was everywhere by Rupert. In fact, parliamentarian Pamphletir said his dog was a devil or some sort of malign spirit. Anyway, he was killed on the battlefield, so Rupert was dismayed for many reasons. York fell to Parliament, as I said, Newcastle fell as well that year, and as a result, the North of England was sewn up for the parliamentary cause. There were though some glimmers in 1644, which in retrospect looked like a bit of
38:27 Dan Snow? a false dawn, but there were glimmers of hope for King Charles. Although the north of England fell to Parliament, there was pretty brutal infighting in the parliamentary cause. Lots of disagreements, lots of bitter, personal rivalries, uncertainty about what to do next. There was also some good news from Scotland, where the remarkable Marquess of Montrose landed and welded an army of Highlanders together to inflict a series of crushing defeats on Scottish forces. But it was in the west of England where Charles enjoyed probably his greatest success. The South West had been a real stronghold for the Royalists, but as in so many places, while the Royalists controlled great swathes of the countryside, many of the key towns and ports had been secured for the parliamentary
39:12 Dan Snow? side. That was true of ports in Dorset, but also Plymouth. And so the Earl of Essex, with a parliamentarian force, marched into the west country to try and secure those ports, protect them from Royalist forces that were besieging them. And he enjoyed some initial success. He did march along the coast at Lyme Bay, secured some of those ports there. He did move to Plymouth and lifted a Royalist siege of Plymouth. And then, if you look at geography, this isn't hugely surprising, he became sort of trapped. He became trapped in this peninsula, the southwest tip of England, Devon and Cornwall. King Charles had led a royal army down there, following Essex, and now had him bottled up. Essex's only real move was to desperately try and get to the coast, where he hoped that parliamentary
39:55 Dan Snow? control of the seas would allow a fleet to evacuate him, a sort of Dunkirk of 1644. And he got to a place called Lost Withyld, just north of the Cornish port of Foy. But there, King Charles caught up with him. And it's very hard to conduct an evacuation when you're being hard pressed by the enemy. And so the Earl of Essex was trapped. He had to maintain his defensive lines. He couldn't escape to sea, but he couldn't hope to break out either. He made defensive arc around the town. But Charles outnumbered him and began a series of attacks that pushed back that parliamentary perimeter. Charles tightened the noose until the Earl of Essex realised that defeat was inevitable. He ordered his cavalry commander to gallop off with some 2,000 cavalry so they could live to fight another day.
40:36 Dan Snow? I've always thought, when you're an infantryman watching the cavalry just gallop off, just completely abandoning you, you know that your time is nigh. And indeed, those poor, long-suffering infantrymen wouldn't just be abandoned by their cavalry. Eventually, the Earl of Essex and his top brass jumped in a fishing boat, managed to make it to a parliamentary ship, so they were fine. But unfortunately, there'd be no such luck for those left. And on the 2nd of September, Charles agreed to accept the surrender of the parliamentary forces. They'd lost astonishing 6,000 men in that campaign. Many of them went into captivity and many of them would not survive, they endured cruel treatment at the hands of their royalist captains. This was a big setback for the parliamentarian cause.
41:18 Dan Snow? Also disappointing was a battle that happened late in the year, the Second Battle of Newbury. This was a drawn battle, really, once Charles had returned to the Oxford area. Parliament had the chance, I think, to destroy Charles's army there, but failed to do so. And that led to a call for really profound change, reform, within the parliamentarian cause. And what you get at the end of 1644 is these young men who are hard, they're good at war, they've been thrust now into leadership positions as a result of their expertise on the battlefield. They want changes, and they got changes. Men like Oliver Cromwell. Let's get back to my chat with Minoo.
41:54 Speaker 02 It's not a totally disastrous year, but it is one which in retrospect, we can read the tea leaves. But ultimately, it leads to another round of negotiation as 1644 turns to 1645, and one which has both of our friends in positions of great influence as leader of their respective peace parties.
42:13 Dan Snow? So by the end of 1644, what are our two protagonists thinking?
42:18 Speaker 02 Well, they've had to deal with a very difficult personal situation in the trial of Archbishop Lord, who is an old family friend and the sort of university mentor of Whitlock, and also was the most important patron of Hyde. And Archbishop Lord, in a way, it's rather surprising that he wasn't executed earlier at the same time as Stratford, but instead he was allowed to linger on in the Tower. He was thought to be no particular harm, but the parliamentarians decided to send a strong message by getting rid of him, almost to show that they meant no nonsense when it came to negotiations. And he was once again proceeded against by a tainer, no legal case needing to be proved against him.
43:00 Speaker 02 But Whitlock is basically press-ganged to take part in this case against the Archbishop and refuses to, which I think shows a measure of loyalty and courage. He's a man with waning influence after Waller's plot and the bound covenant. He's rumored to be royalist in sympathy, but he refuses to be brow-beaten in prosecuting his old friend and mentor, Lord. Lord is got rid of, and we set the scene for an extraordinary treaty at Uxbridge, a treaty with not just two sides but three, because the Scots also involved. You have three groups all living in different coaching-ins and meeting at the local manor house, built and owned by a corrupt Jacobean courtier a generation before.
43:44 Speaker 02 Ironically enough, the manor house is now the major pub in Uxbridge, called the Crown and Treaty, and a lot of the very same wood carving and rooms where the treaty was conducted can still be seen there. But you have the Scots, the Royalists and the parliamentarians living in different parts of Uxbridge and meeting at Place House and thrashing out the most important questions.
44:04 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Snow's History at There's More Coming Up.
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46:00 Dan Snow? Did our two protagonists hope that this would yield results?
46:04 Speaker 02 I think they very much did. I think that a measure of unreality had crept into the situation. I think that they were both pushing very, very hard at a locked door. Crucially, however, I do think that they still just about believed in each other's sincerity. The huge issues up for debate at Utsbridge were, as ever, the control of the militia and the settlement of church government, and finally, what on earth to do about Ireland. And the ways in which our friends specifically crossed swords with each other at that debate are fascinating. And I am tempted to think at times stagey, pre-arranged.
46:45 Speaker 02 I think that they made a big deal of their opposition to one another in order to gain political credibility with their own sides that would then enable them to move their own sides towards a compromise. But these extraordinarily complex and sophisticated games were being conducted in extremely unpromising circumstances. One problem was that Charles, again, felt like his fortunes were on the up. Quite unrelatedly, the extraordinary Royalist General Montrose was doing very well in Scotland and suggesting that the king, that would be madness and treachery almost for the king to compromise with anyone at this point. So the king was in no mood for compromise. And Parliament, as you mentioned, was coming under the influence of the independent war party,
47:30 Speaker 02 much more hot in religion and belligerent in war.
47:34 Dan Snow? And that's the problem with war, is that I guess it tends to reward those who have prospered under it.
47:41 Speaker 02 Yes, indeed. It intrigues me, for example, in a way you can imagine Whitlock and Cromwell at the beginning of the war. There's not much between them. They're both amateur soldiers, MPs from a similar class. But I was struck by the way in which Whitlock, in his own head, could have been a Cromwell very easily. But in fact, Cromwell was a Cromwell, as we know, but as he didn't. I think Hilary Montell makes the brilliant point that the protagonists of the past aren't aware of their own stories, and we are. So we might think of Whitlock as a civilized, time-serving lawyer. But in his head, he could have been the amateur soldier who came up with the strategy to break the dam.
48:22 Speaker 02 He could have been all kinds of things. For instance, we see him advocating the occupation of Oxford and the installation of himself as its governor. It's turned down purely because he doesn't get on with um his superior Viscount Sean Seale. But that could potentially indeed have changed the course of the war to a much earlier stage. It's not set in stone for these people who will emerge from it as the heroes. And I think it's an interesting historical accident that in a way Hyde and Whitlock and also Lord Falkland all rather vanish in the shadow of Cromwell. But for themselves, they were pretty pivotal figures for far longer in the war than Cromwell was. Cromwell rather had Johnny come lately influenced towards the end.
49:04 Speaker 02 Of course, the New Model Army and Cromwell was going to be the end of the story. But I think the crucial thing is that Hyde and Whitlock did not know that. And they still hoped in early sixteen forty five for a peace, a resolution, to stop a war that never for them needed to have happened at all in the first place and save a ravaged country.
49:25 Dan Snow? Instead, that war would rage on. In Scotland, the mercurial Marquess of Montrose, who really is one of the great commanders of British history. He effectively did manage to bizarrely conquer Scotland for the king and he held on to it briefly. But all that work would be undone because in England, Charles suffered a catastrophic defeat. The New Model Army was led by men who knew their business. It was led by the epic combination of Fairfax and Cromwell. And it met up with the Royal Army at Naseby in Northamptonshire, right in the centre of England. When you go there today, it just feels like the most fitting place for a decisive battle of a civil war.
50:07 Dan Snow? Green, wide open, rolling agricultural fields divided by ancient hedges. A place where cavalry can ride hard at each other and where large bodies of infantry can to lock horns and push each other like it's a rugby scrum. It is the archetypal field of battle in the heart of England. And it was on that field that the cause of King Charles was destroyed. Again, it's a pattern you may come to recognise now. Prince Rupert's cavalry charged and drove off the parliamentarian horse that were opposing him. They were unstoppable force and indeed they did not stop galloping until they'd filled their saddlebags with booty and they'd found a comfortable hostelry to spend that booty in.
50:51 Dan Snow? Cromwell's horse, by complete contrast, on the other wing, saw off their royalist enemies, just as they'd done at Mastermore. And then just again, exact repeat. They then reined in with iron discipline. They didn't go charging off to enjoy the spoils of war. They wheeled round on the order of their commander, Oliver Cromwell, and smashed into the royalist infantry in the centre. And that was it. The royalist infantry fought long and hard. They held out like a blue wall, but they were surrounded. The route was long and brutal. King Charles's luggage and correspondence was captured, and there were lots of embarrassing tidbits in there and lurid details, which were then capitalised upon by parliamentarian propagandists. Thousands of Charles's men were captured. The heart was torn out of the royalist war machine.
51:36 Dan Snow? Then Parliament could send a force north to quickly deal with Montrose, regain control of Scotland. They mopped up royalists' forces elsewhere. They were really into the endgame now. In early 1646, the royalists surrendered Chester, and with it the whole of the North West. Dartmouth fell, and a month later, the army in the West Country, the last great real royal stronghold, that was routed in Devon. And that was it with the fall of the South West. Charles had no other cards to play. On May the 5th, 1646, King Charles surrendered, but not to Parliament, to the Scots. Minoo briefly explains what happened once King Charles made the surrender, and where our two protagonists ended up.
52:20 Speaker 02 Whitlock is left trying to work out how to make the country work, what the definition of the country is with the king in that position, and ultimately becoming very crucial civilian administrator and lawyer under Cromwell. And Hyde is left in what's arguably his greatest and most lasting talent as a writer of history, initially on the island of Jersey, musing over the First Civil War. His history is initially written as advice for the king, who of course is still very much alive at this point. So, yes, around the end of the First Civil War, Whitlock as a still prosperous and influential civilian politician, trying to make the country function,
53:03 Speaker 02 and Hyde as a great writer and historian pondering where it all went wrong.
53:08 Dan Snow? Well, thank you very much for joining us on this podcast. People, if they want to find out more, can read your book, which is called? Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Thank you, Dan.
53:24 Dan Snow? That's the end of this podcast, folks. Thank you very much for listening. That's certainly not the end of the civil wars. The wars of the three kingdoms, the English Civil Wars, call them what you will. They would go on. Charles would escape. Charles would attempt to fight again. Charles's son would fight again. Goodness me, there was a lot of fighting to come. And then the military dictatorship of Oliver Cornwell. But for the purposes of this podcast, we thought we'd leave it here, ending it at the end of the first civil war. A huge thank you again to Manu Dinshaw for guiding us through this epic story. Make sure to check out his book, Friends in Youth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War. We will return, folks. We will return. See you next time.
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