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

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