Welcome to exciting new weekly podcasts from top historians, all about the British Civil Wars.
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The last major battle of the British Civil Wars was fought out in and around the city of Worcester on 3rd September 1651. With the 375th anniversary of this momentous event now upon us, we felt that the time was right to ask for a succinct reappraisal of the campaign and battle. To do this, ... Read more
On 24 April 1648 a rioting crowd in the centre of the city of Norwich accidentally unleashed the largest explosion recorded in seventeenth-century England. Ninety-eight barrels of gunpowder were detonated; about three times as much as was hidden in cellars under Parliament by the notorious Gunpowder Plotters of 1605. Norwich magistrates’ subsequent investigation made the ... Read more
The city of Norwich, England’s largest provincial city during the 1640s, sat deep within the parliamentarian-controlled territory of the Eastern Association. It is sometimes wrongly dismissed as isolated from the fighting, and only marginally affected by the civil wars. Yet in this podcast, Andrew Hopper, Professor of Local and Social History at Oxford Lifelong Learning, ... Read more
Colchester in Essex was a hotbed of Puritanism in the seventeenth century. Unsurprisingly, the Essex town came out strongly for Parliament when civil war broke out in 1642. However, just six years later, the townsfolk would find themselves besieged – and systematically starved – by parliamentarian forces commanded by Thomas, Lord Fairfax. The siege, which ... Read more
Informing and informers were pervasive in successive governments’ attempts to maintain the security and stability of the English Republic between 1649 and 1660. Some members of the public felt that by informing on others they significantly and positively contributed to the security of the Interregnum Regimes. Indeed, many members of the public considered that informing ... Read more
In 1660, the Restoration of the Monarchy made the question of remembering and memorialising the English Revolution not only controversial, but also dangerous. In that year, the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity pardoned those other than the regicides who had rebelled against the crown during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. The Act commanded the ... Read more
What was the landscape of rural England like, over which many of the battles of the Civil Wars were fought? How did these fields and woods shape the armies’ tactics and influence the outcomes of battles such as Naseby which would alter British, and even World, history? And how different is the remaining rural landscape ... Read more
Strategically located at the lowest bridging point of the River Trent, the market town of Newark in Nottinghamshire became the focus of one of the most sustained conflicts of the British Civil Wars. Staunchly Royalist, the town’s inhabitants were besieged by Parliamentary forces three times – in February 1643; again in February and March 1644; ... Read more
The experiences of the Montgomeryshire gentleman and lawyer, Edward Vaughan, provide a remarkable story of law, civil war and gentry life in mid seventeenth-century Wales. In this podcast Lloyd Bowen, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cardiff, uncovers a rich narrative of how local enmities were shaped by national events. Born in ... Read more
William Cavendish, Earl and later Duke of Newcastle, was the foremost of the King’s aristocratic Generals. By 1643 he’d raised the largest Royalist army of the First Civil War. He was granted greater powers than any other regional royalist commander, and was able to raise his own taxes and coin money. He also dubbed 12 ... Read more
Pantomime villains, box office gold and famous (or infamous) shadowy figures of fiction and non-fiction, pirates are familiar stereotypes in popular media. But these common images hide a critically important group of men (and occasionally women) who were socially, economically and politically significant in shaping the European maritime empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ... Read more
The inseparable intimate relationship between politics, production and trade in the years preceding the Civil Wars has often been underplayed or even ignored. However, historians now increasingly recognise that the links between occupation and religious beliefs were fundamentally important in nurturing opposition to the King and his government in the years prior to the Civil ... Read more
Major-General Thomas Harrison (1616 – 1660) is one of the most complex figures to emerge during Interregnum. He was promoted through the ranks of the Parliamentary Army, starting as a trooper at the Battle of Powick Bridge, one of the first engagements of the war in September 1642. He rose to command the Army in Wales, and then in England in 1651 while Cromwell was in Scotland. Unsurprisingly as a ... Read more
After years of tension between a king and his people, in 1641 England reaches a semblance of peace. Armies have disbanded, legislation has passed to ensure Parliament will continue to sit, and the people are tentatively optimistic. Radical politicians congratulate themselves on a stunning political victory. Royal servants are coming to accept an altered future. ... Read more
The early Quaker movement was remarkable for its prolific use of print to spread its messages throughout Britain. Indeed, print was critically important in the successful proselytizing of the Quaker message across the country in these early days. It was through its pamphlets that Quaker thinking and arguments became so powerful so rapidly in revolutionary ... Read more
Recent research, particularly by members of the Civil War Petitions Project, has shown how the experiences of the wounded and widowed are central to understanding the conflict’s impact on British society. In this talk by the Project’s Principal Investigator, Professor Andrew Hopper, we glimpse the dramatic extent of the War’s destructive effects upon the people of Yorkshire. Large sums of money were raised for military welfare, indicating the consent and commitment of ... Read more
From the 1990s, the approaches of revisionist historians to the Civil Wars did much to recast the series of conflicts as ‘the Wars of the Three Kingdoms’. These historians stressed the importance of events in Scotland and Ireland in bringing about the eventual outbreak of Civil War in England. But the Civil Wars were not ... Read more
In this programme, Vanessa Emmett, a doctoral student in English Local History at Kellogg College at the University of Oxford, discusses the contribution of Oxford’s citizens to the Royalist war effort between 1642 and 1646. When King Charles I and his court arrived in Oxford to take up residence in November 1642, he was welcomed by ... Read more
Much has been written and discussed about the effects of the execution of Charles I on the future history of England. But its impact on Scotland has often received less attention. Yet, within a week of the death of Charles I, his son had been declared not just King of Scotland, but King of Britain ... Read more
The military histories of the British and Irish Civil Wars largely focus on the land-based conflict, while the critical strategic importance of the wars at sea is often ignored or downplayed. Yet this was the period when the foundations were laid of the modern navy which gave Britain global maritime supremacy for centuries to come. ... Read more
One of the most important and formative decades in the adolescent life of Charles Stuart, soon to become Charles the Second, between 1646 and 1660 was spent in exile. During this time, he experienced the loss of his father, publicly beheaded in his absence, military defeat and near-capture after the Battle of Worcester, friction with ... Read more
Early modern Europe, including England, was a violent and dangerous place to live. Just how dangerous has been revealed by research in archives across Europe by Professor Stuart Carroll of the University of York. He argues that violence increased sharply in the sixteenth century and remained high until the 1720s. Throughout this time, disagreements repeatedly ... Read more
Historians of the British and Irish Civil Wars have repeatedly asked to what extent was Charles I responsible for his own downfall and consequently, the failure of the monarchy? In this programme, Jacqueline Eales, Emerita Professor of Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University, traces how the King’s intransigence repeatedly undermined potential supporters who ... Read more
On 6 December 1648, Pride’s Purge marked a watershed moment in the English Revolution. By arresting some MPs and preventing others from sitting, the New Model Army seized political power. Now the Army, rather than Parliament, would dictate the future settlement of England. The exclusion of the more moderate MPs ensured that a hard line ... Read more
The formation of the New Model Army placed a significant burden on every taxpayer in England at a time when wartime devastation, disruption of trade and a series of poor harvests was already causing hardship across Britain. According to the Army’s detractors, the country could simply not afford to pay a cost equivalent to over ... Read more
