Parliament’s Sequestration (or confiscation) of royalist assets – land, property and money – was one of the most divisive outcomes of the civil wars.  For the bankrupt victors, this was a critically important source of income. The regime had to repay the loans from London financiers that had financed the conflict as well as tackle ... Read more

What was the experience of the ordinary soldier’s, life in the ranks of a civil war army? It was hard and frequently uncertain. Simply surviving was a challenge, particularly as England experienced prolonged periods of cold, wet weather throughout the mid-seventeenth century. In the third programme in this landmark series specially commissioned for The World Turned Upside ... Read more

How do you recruit, train and organise an army? How can it be housed, fed and equipped with arms and munitions during a protracted war? How can you maintain moral and discipline? How can you care for the wounded and bury the dead? Every Royalist and Parliamentarian leader and every officer in the filed faced ... Read more

For decades the civil wars were presented as a “gentlemanly” conflict where both sides “played” by the rules of “civilised” warfare. But now we know the reality was very different. In fact this was a protracted, bloody fight that disrupted, and at times, destroyed, the lives of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children ... Read more

While terms such as “slavery” and “liberty”, frequently occur in parliamentarian rhetoric, particularly when damning their enemies, ever-increasing numbers of West African people were actually being transported across the ocean to colonies in the Caribbean. According to distinguished parliamentary historian, Dr Stephen Roberts, it was during the Interregnum that the foundations of Britain’s leading role ... Read more

New research now published by the Royal Historical Society reveals for the first time how Lord and Lady Brooke and their household made Warwick Castle a strategic stronghold for Parliament and withstood a Royalist siege. In this podcast, the authors of the book explore the lives of these men and women revealed in the household accounts of ... Read more

To mark Women’s History Month we invited distinguished historian Jackie Eales, Emeritus Professor of Early Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University, to explore the role of women in the civil wars – a topic largely ignored in earlier studies of the period. She concludes that overall changes in the social status of women were limited and ... Read more

Following the execution of Charles I on 30th January 1649, the Republic’s government faced a dilemma: How should recent events be remembered and how, if at all, should they be commemorated? In the decade between the Regicide and the Restoration, authorities and individuals who had fought on both sides of the recent bloody conflict struggled to ... Read more

The Saffron Walden debates In June 1646 as the First Civil War ended, there was an ever-widening gulf between the New Model Army and Parliament which would eventually split the two pillars of what later became Britain’s only experiment with a republican constitution. By the end of the year the pay of the New Model ... Read more

While the attention paid to the naval history of the British and Irish Civil Wars has increased in recent years, the parts played by women have often been ignored. In this programme, Dr. Elaine Murphy, Associate Professor in History at the University of Plymouth, reveals how more and more women engaged with Parliament’s navy in ... Read more