The World Turned Upside Down - The British Civil Wars 1638-1651

It is often said that there was nothing ‘civil’ about the British Civil Wars. This was not the story of dashing Cavaliers and God-fearing Roundheads fighting battles in fields far from the civilian population. In reality, this was a bloody and brutal, all-encompassing conflict which left no community or family untouched and which left an ... Read more

“Turncoat!” The word creates immediate images of traitors, renegades and defectors… here is a person who places self-interest above the well-being or safety of comrades-in-arms, and so switches sides irrespective of the resulting harm it does to the Cause. Betrayed comrades react with contempt and demand harsh sanctions, even a gruesome traitor’s death, while the ... Read more

The Civil Wars changed the lives of families all across the British Isles, and inevitably children became involved not only as passive bystanders, but also as child soldiers fighting in both the Royalist and Parliamentary armies. Civil War historian, Dr Ismini Pells, a Departmental Lecturer in Local and Social History at the University of Oxford, ... Read more

The British Civil Wars touched every man, woman and child in Britain and its effects were felt for decades after the conflict ended in 1652. During the conflict, thousands of men were left maimed, women widowed and children orphaned. They were desperate for help from successive Republican regimes, the Protectorate that followed and subsequently from ... Read more

In this interview, Dr. Ismini Pells reveals that PTSD in veterans is not a new problem. She discusses the psychological impact that can be seen in the men who fought in the Civil Wars.

Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649 on a scaffold outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall. In this talk Professor Edward Vallance asks whether his condemnation and death were the pre-determined outcome of his trial or was the king’s death the result of demands for justice from the Parliamentarian army and its civilian supporters. He ... Read more

This podcast discusses the range of factors which caused the defeat of the royalists in England and Wales during the First Civil War of 1642-1646. Its themes range from royalist structural weaknesses, their shortages of manpower and resources, to defeat in battle and the withdrawal of civilian support from the royalist cause. The decisive role of ... Read more

While many potential causes of the British Civil Wars have been identified, from social and economic pressures to religious division, in this talk Professor Edward Vallance focuses on the degree to which the king himself was responsible for the conflict. Few historians think that Charles I was a highly competent monarch. However, the main difference ... Read more

By the 1640s, Parliament was at the very centre of British history. The accession of Charles the First to the throne in 1625 began a bitter rivalry for dominance with a King whose political and religious views brought him into head-to-head conflict with an increasingly assertive Parliament. For two decades, Civil War, Regicide, a Republic ... Read more

Professor Peter Gaunt describes the changing historiography from contemporary historians of the seventeenth century to the discussions of modern academics. He suggests that there probably was no single cause of the conflict, but an intertwining of multiple factors, made more compatible by socioeconomics and religious attitudes, a constitution which fostered uncertainty and a monarch who ... Read more