First English Civil War: The Rise of Cromwell and the New Model Army

For those living through it, it was a time of madness. A time of horror and hope. A time when all creation got turned on its head, and the unthinkable became possible.

Erupting in 1642, the First English Civil War pitted the forces of Parliament against the autocratic monarch Charles I in a showdown over the rights of kings and commoners. But while it may have begun as a localized conflict on one rainy island, it soon spun off into something much broader. As the fighting raged, consuming not just England, but also Scotland and Ireland, brand new ideas sprang up that would impact the Western world.

Military innovations, yes. But also social movements that pushed forward radical notions that prefigured the coming Enlightenment. Yet even as these new horizons were opening, a dark counterforce was rising — a force that would soon place England under a Puritanical dictatorship, even as it unleashed horror in Ireland.

Three Kingdoms, One Incompetent King

The British Isles are home to two sovereign states today: the United Kingdom, and the Republic of Ireland. In the early seventeenth century, however, this was not the case. Instead of two nations occupying the islands, there were three: the Kingdom of England (which included Wales), the Kingdom of Scotland, and the Kingdom of Ireland — with Ireland effectively ruled as an English colony.

Yet these three very different states had one thing in common: a king. One king to rule them all. And, as the dark days of the Civil War dawned, that king was none other than Charles I.

The son of Scottish King James VI — who had also taken over England in 1603 as James I — Charles was only the second-ever monarch to unite all British kingdoms in personal union. Unfortunately, he would prove so singularly incompetent, stubborn, and deluded that he would wind up plunging all three of them into war. From the moment Charles I ascended to the English throne in 1625, it was clear trouble was brewing.

As a human being, Charles was apparently rather shy and sweet. As king, though, he was the stuff of early-seventeenth-century nightmares. He was married to a Catholic in an era when most English adults could still recall Catholics trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.

Charles’s personal beliefs seemed to mostly revolve around the divine right of kings, and how advantageous it was to keep raising taxes. This was a problem, because only England’s Parliament could authorize tax hikes, and MPs were more concerned about Charles trying to rule like a God. The King kept calling Parliaments and demanding they raise taxes, only for Parliament to instead exercise its right to make speeches denouncing the king.

At which point Charles would exercise his right to dissolve Parliament and the whole sorry process would start all over again. In both 1625 and 1626, Charles dissolved Parliaments. Each time, though, he was forced to recall them to help fund his foreign wars.

Things came to a head in 1629, after one of the King’s closest advisors was assassinated while Parliament was in session, trying to impeach that same advisor. Blaming the impeachment process, Charles dissolved Parliament for a third time. This time, though, he would not call a new one for eleven long years.

The Eleven Years of Tyranny and the Bishops’ Wars

For Charles’s supporters, the following period was known as the era of Personal Rule, with Charles using offices of state to rule by decree. To his opponents, though, it became known as the Eleven Years of Tyranny. Charles still needed to raise taxes, but since only Parliament had the power to do so, he got creative in his methods.

There was Ship Money — a long-standing tax on seaside towns to help pay for the Navy, which Charles decided to also impose on inland towns. Or that time he dug out a long-forgotten thirteenth-century document that required all freeholders to attend a king’s coronation, then fined everyone who had not attended his. By the late 1630s, most of Charles’s English subjects were furious.

Not that the King cared. So long as he never had to call another Parliament, he would never have to listen to their complaints. At the same time he was ruling England as a one-man show, Charles was also pushing ahead with plans to bring his kingdoms closer.

Specifically, he wanted to force worshippers across England, Scotland, and Ireland to use the same liturgy — an idea he cooked up with the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud. The trouble was, Charles and Laud were both suspected of being secret Catholics. And the liturgy they settled on appeared, to suspicious Protestants, akin to Papist idolatry.

In 1637, the King imposed this new liturgy on Scotland with zero consultation and little warning. All summer there were riots in Edinburgh. In the aftermath, most of Scotland’s great and good got together and swore the National Covenant, a vow to protect their Presbyterian faith.

It should have been a warning to Charles — to back down before things got serious. But the King did not see a warning; he just saw another challenge to his authority. Mustering an army, Charles marched north to put Scotland in its place, only for the Scots to defeat him soundly.

Taking place in 1639 and 1640, the Bishops’ Wars ended not just with the Scottish Covenanters victorious, but with their army now occupying parts of northern England. Defeated, desperate, and utterly broke, the humiliated Charles was forced to do something he had sworn never to do again. In April 1640, he called a new Parliament.

The Long Parliament and the Road to War

Perhaps, in the back of the King’s mind, there was hope that things had changed after eleven years. Instead, the 1640 Parliament convened, frowned at its crinkled old notes from 1629, and picked up right where it had left off criticizing the King. It turned out many MPs were sympathetic to the Covenanter cause, and even those who were not could not pass up an opportunity to harangue Charles for the last eleven years.

So the King did what the King did best: he dissolved Parliament, for the fourth time. But this did not solve the issue of the Scottish army squatting in Newcastle. That November, Charles was forced to call another Parliament.

Known as the Long Parliament, it lasted eight whole years. The first of which was spent almost exclusively undermining the King. Under MP John Pym, the Long Parliament refused to raise money to fight Scotland without first reclaiming all those rights the King had snatched away.

This meant Charles being forced to sit there bitterly as his allies, like Archbishop Laud, were impeached. Pym and the Commons abolished all the offices that had helped sustain Personal Rule. The unfair taxes were outlawed.

They passed a law forcing the King to call a Parliament at least once every three years. Had things stopped there, war might have been averted. But then two things came along at once that destroyed England’s chances of peace.

The first was the impeachment of one of Charles’s advisors, during the process of which documents came to light proving the King had asked the Irish Parliament to raise an army. To jumpy English Puritans, it looked like their Catholic-loving king was raising an Irish Catholic army to oppress them. This led to the Grand Remonstrance — a list of all the things Parliament hated about Charles.

Then, in October 1641, Ireland erupted. In the region of Ulster, Irish natives who had been oppressed for centuries rose up against their Protestant English and Scottish overlords. As rebellion swept the island, both King and Parliament looked on in horror.

Everyone agreed something had to be done. An army was raised to put down the Irish revolt. But who would get to raise that army?

Remarkably, it would be trying to answer this simple-sounding question that sent England spiraling into war.

England Burning: From Standoff to Open War

It is a sign of how low trust had fallen between King and Parliament that, even with the Irish in revolt, neither side was willing to let the other raise an army. In his paranoia-soaked mind, Charles was convinced Parliament had secretly organized the Scottish Covenanter invasion and would now use any new army to chase him from power. Over in Parliament, MPs were whispering that Charles had instigated the Irish rebellion just so he would have an excuse to raise an army and crush them all.

The standoff could have lasted indefinitely, had the King not done something extremely foolish. Fed up with Parliament acting like it was boss, Charles mustered 400 armed men and, on January 4, 1642, marched to the House of Commons, determined to arrest John Pym and four other MPs. It was the first time a reigning king had ever entered the Commons — a slap in the face for Parliamentary authority.

Sadly for Charles, it was also a humiliating failure. Pym and the others had been tipped off the night before and fled into hiding in London. The King was forced to simply stand there as he demanded John Pym and no one stepped forward.

Charles left empty-handed and bitter. With pro-Parliament riots sweeping London, he and his family fled the capital on January 10. With that, the race was on to raise an army for the clearly approaching war.

That spring, Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance, giving it the right to raise an army without the King’s consent. Charles, in turn, used the Commissions of Array, giving him the right to raise an army without Parliament’s consent. By summer 1642, England’s nobles were having to decide whose summons to respond to — a decision that was fracturing communities and splitting families.

In London, Parliament established a Committee of Safety to run the war and elevated the Earl of Essex to commander of its new army. Then, on August 22, 1642, Charles raised his standard in Nottingham. And, just like that, England was officially at war.

In this era, there was no such thing as a standing, professional army. Nor were there many who had witnessed battle. Despite the Thirty Years War raging on the continent, most Englishmen had almost no practical experience of warfare.

That meant no one — with one or two important exceptions — really knew how to fight a conflict that did not involve immediately losing to Scotland. This was all too evident in the first months, as everyone just pottered around, hoping to bump into each other.

Edgehill and the Stalemate of 1642–1643

Finally, in October, the opposing armies found one another almost by accident. At Edgehill, on the road to London, the two sides lined up — King and Parliament, each fielding around 14,000 men and cavalry. Among these horsemen was 23-year-old Prince Rupert: the Prague-born nephew of Charles I, and one of those important exceptions who really had seen action.

Now lined up on the Royalist side, Rupert was the King’s secret weapon. At 3pm on October 23, a cry went up. The two sides facing one another charged, and the Battle of Edgehill — the first battle of the First English Civil War — began.

Almost immediately it became obvious the Royalists would win. As head of cavalry, Rupert smashed Parliament’s horsemen so badly they took off running, leaving their infantry exposed. It should have been the end.

Probably would have been, had Rupert not decided to chase Parliament’s fleeing horsemen, leaving the Royalists suddenly without backup. With Rupert off the field for hours, Parliament managed to fight to an unexpected draw. The big battle that could have ended the war turned out to be its opening salvo.

Charles tried to end it anyway. With Parliament’s army exhausted, the King marched his men to London to attack the capital. But an emergency call for militia resulted in 24,000 men mustering to fight back — an army so big Charles did not even try to engage them.

Instead, the King withdrew to Oxford to establish a new royal capital and bide his time. Although 1642 had given them cautious hope, 1643 would see Parliamentary forces given a shellacking. In January, Cornwall fell to the King’s men.

In July, Parliament’s Western Association army was destroyed, while the vital port city of Bristol was captured. By the First Battle of Newbury in September, the momentum seemed so firmly with the Royalists that they nearly wiped out Parliament’s army under the Earl of Essex. It was only a brave stand by a militia unit, combined with the King running out of gunpowder, that allowed them to survive.

The Rise of Fairfax and Cromwell

While 1643 was Parliament’s worst year, it introduced someone crucial to the story: Thomas Fairfax. A Yorkshire-based aristocrat in his early thirties, Fairfax and his father were some of the only people in the north not to take the King’s side. Instead, they commanded Parliament’s northern army — which, like most Roundhead forces, suffered a string of defeats in 1643.

Defeats which culminated with the Fairfaxes retreating into the city of Hull and fortifying it. Thomas was shot through the wrist in the retreat and nearly bled out. But they made it.

And, once inside Hull, they launched raids across Yorkshire, stopping the Northern Royalists from marching south to reinforce the King. That September, Fairfax slipped out of Hull and joined Parliament’s Eastern Association army. It was while serving with them that he found himself fighting alongside a skilled cavalry officer — a former farmer-turned-MP and diehard Puritan who had witnessed Prince Rupert throw away victory at Edgehill and was determined to learn from his enemy’s mistakes.

That Puritan’s name was Oliver Cromwell. Together, he and Fairfax would make history. Meanwhile, the war’s ripple effects were swamping Charles’s other two kingdoms.

The rebellion in Ireland had metamorphosed into a sprawling conflict known as the Confederate Wars. In September 1643, the King’s representative cut a deal: in return for letting English troops leave Ireland to fight for the King, they would agree to a one-year ceasefire with the Irish rebels. When Parliament got wind of the deal, they were alarmed.

Worried this ceasefire was really an excuse for Charles to call over an Irish Catholic army, they decided they needed an ally. The obvious choice was Scotland. Just weeks after Charles’s Irish ceasefire, Parliament signed the Solemn League and Covenant — a deal which promised that, if Scotland helped them win the war, England would convert to the Covenanters’ Presbyterian faith.

In January 1644, a Covenanter army over 20,000 strong invaded England. In London, a joint Committee of Both Kingdoms was formed to direct the war effort. And, just like that, it was the Royalists’ turn to have a dreadful year.

Marston Moor: The Decisive Battle

The arrival of the Scots, combined with a series of other Parliamentary victories, sent the tide of war sweeping in the other direction. Starting in December 1643, Thomas Fairfax began a rampage across the North in which town after town fell to his forces. By spring, he had pushed the northern Royalists into the city of York and laid siege to it.

Down in Oxford, a panicked Charles tried to quickly regain legitimacy by calling a new Royalist Parliament, but even this loyal chamber became too much for him and he wound up dissolving it twice. Meanwhile, with York about to fall, Prince Rupert dashed north to help. By the time he arrived — on July 2, 1644 — Fairfax’s army had linked up with a major Scottish Covenanter force to form a powerful army.

Outnumbered, Rupert probably should have turned and fled, but he believed he had been ordered to fight. That evening, the two sides lined up at Marston Moor. Around 7:30pm a huge thunderstorm broke over the battlefield.

Assuming they would have to wait until the next day, Rupert retired to his quarters. He had barely got there when a shout went up. Parliament’s forces surged forwards through the rain.

It was the beginning of the Battle of Marston Moor, perhaps the biggest battle ever fought on English soil. After crashing through the Royalist cavalry on his flank, Cromwell executed an audacious maneuver, looping around the back of the enemy lines. In a coordinated move with Fairfax, he came crashing into their other flank.

The impact of the charge was so great the Royalist lines crumbled. Two hours after it started, as dusk set, the fight was over. Four thousand Royalists lay dead.

Another 1,500 had been taken prisoner. All their gunpowder and weapons had been captured. By contrast, the combined Parliamentary and Covenanter armies lost a mere 300 men.

It was one of the most decisive victories in the war — the royal defeat John Pym could have only dreamed of back when Charles demanded his arrest. Sadly, Pym did not live to see it; he had died of cancer mere months earlier, robbing Parliament of its leading light. In the aftermath of Marston Moor, the Royalist stronghold of York fell, ending Charles’s power in the north.

The New Model Army and the Battle of Naseby

Fortune was not yet done with Charles entirely. The Earl of Essex, always a somewhat unimpressive commander, marched his army into Cornwall in September, hoping to capture the county. Instead, his army got surrounded and destroyed at Lostwithiel, and Essex himself only narrowly escaped with his life.

Meanwhile, the Marquis of Montrose marched into Scotland, hooked up with an Irish army, and proceeded to unleash hell on the Covenanters. Montrose was able to do so much damage that it took Scotland to the brink of conquest. By 1645, the Covenanter army had fled England to protect its home, leaving Parliament without its most powerful army.

So Parliament, at Cromwell’s suggestion, hastily drew plans for a powerful army of its own — a new army that would be a model of its kind: one staffed with well-paid professionals, ruled by iron discipline, and versed in the newest tactics. The New Model Army was formed in February 1645 and was the first national standing army in British history. Under the command of Thomas Fairfax, it had uniforms, no regional affiliations, and a meritocratic system that, unusually for the era, saw talented commoners like the brewer Thomas Pride promoted all the way to officers.

It also had no politicians among its ranks. With Parliament now split into War and Peace factions, there were fears that some Parliamentary commanders were holding back to increase the chance of a negotiated settlement. So the War faction pushed through the Self-Denying Ordinance, forbidding any sitting members from serving in the New Model Army.

The big exception was Oliver Cromwell, who was just so effective at fighting they could not afford to lose him. He became Fairfax’s second in command. That May, Prince Rupert stormed Leicester, sacking the city.

In response, Fairfax marched his new army north. On June 14, the two sides met at the Battle of Naseby. On one side: up to 10,000 Cavaliers under the command of a talented but hotheaded prince.

On the other, a 14,000-strong professional army commanded by the two greatest military minds of their generation. The Battle of Naseby was a sustained Royalist slaughter that saw most of Rupert’s army destroyed, all his artillery captured, and a wagon carrying the King’s private correspondence seized. So total was the defeat that it left Charles with almost no soldiers to his name.

The unthinkable had become possible. A King who everyone believed had been placed on the throne by God himself had effectively been defeated.

The Fall of Oxford and the End of the First Civil War

The months following Naseby were a reel of non-stop misery for England’s Royalists. The New Model Army marched southwest, smashing the last Royalist strongholds one by one, retaking cities like Bristol and forcing the surrender of Cornwall. Up in Scotland, the Marquis of Montrose was finally defeated at the Battle of Philiphaugh, freeing the Covenanter army to march back into England and lay siege to one of the last Royalist cities at Newark.

Although the Covenanters were not quite so enthusiastic anymore. As the war dragged on, radical new social movements were starting to spring up, affecting Parliament’s thinking. One of the most radical was the idea of religious toleration — of allowing different forms of Protestant worship across England.

This gelled badly with the Covenanters’ hopes of installing Presbyterian worship across the British Isles, so much so that it would become a driving factor in the Second English Civil War. For now, though, the alliance between Parliament and the Scots held. On March 21, the last Royalist army was defeated in the field.

That left only Charles’s capital of Oxford for Parliament to conquer. That April, the New Model Army began its long march across the south to besiege the city. The knowledge that a highly trained, highly motivated force was heading his way — and no one could stop them — seems to have forced the King to finally accept the bitter truth.

On April 27, he fled the city in disguise, just ahead of Fairfax and Cromwell, armed only with a last desperate plan: to avoid capture by Parliament by throwing himself on the mercy of the Scots. The siege of Oxford began on May 3. Two days later, Charles handed himself over to the Covenanter Army and surrendered.

At last, on June 24, 1646, Oxford fell to the New Model Army. And, with that, the First English Civil War was over. The larger conflict was nowhere near done.

Ireland was still deep in its own set of wars. With the King now in Scottish captivity, tensions were already starting to rise between Parliament and the Covenanters. No one had yet decided what defeating the King meant.

Would Charles stay on his throne after a peace deal? Had the English Civil War been fought over the rights of Parliament, or for religious reasons? The war had done the impossible: it had taken a King and laid him low — not by having another royal knock him off his pedestal, but a group of upstart commoners.

It was a new chapter in English history, something that had never happened before. And figuring out what to do next would lead not just to more bloodshed, but to regicide, revolution, and the transformation of all three British kingdoms.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why did Charles I go eleven years without calling a Parliament?

After dissolving Parliament for the third time in 1629, Charles I ruled by decree through offices of state in what his opponents called the Eleven Years of Tyranny. He raised revenue through creative means such as Ship Money — a coastal tax extended to inland towns — and revived obsolete feudal fines, avoiding Parliament because it consistently challenged his authority and his belief in the divine right of kings.

What was the Solemn League and Covenant and why did it matter?

The Solemn League and Covenant was a treaty signed in 1643 between Parliament and Scotland’s Covenanters. In exchange for Scotland sending an army of over 20,000 men into England to fight against Charles I, Parliament promised to convert England to the Covenanters’ Presbyterian faith. The Scottish army’s arrival turned the tide of the war and directly enabled the Parliamentary victory at Marston Moor in July 1644.

How did the New Model Army differ from earlier Parliamentary forces?

Formed in February 1645 at Oliver Cromwell’s suggestion, the New Model Army was England’s first national standing army. Unlike earlier regional forces, it had uniforms, iron discipline, no regional affiliations, and a meritocratic promotion system that allowed talented commoners — such as the brewer Thomas Pride — to rise to officer rank. Its commanders were also barred from holding Parliamentary seats under the Self-Denying Ordinance, removing politically motivated caution from military decision-making.

What made the Battle of Naseby the decisive engagement of the war?

At Naseby on June 14, 1645, Fairfax’s 14,000-strong professional New Model Army faced up to 10,000 Cavaliers under Prince Rupert. The result was a sustained Royalist slaughter: most of Rupert’s army was destroyed, all his artillery captured, and — critically — a wagon carrying the King’s private correspondence was seized. The defeat left Charles with almost no remaining soldiers and effectively ended any realistic prospect of a Royalist military victory.

How did the First English Civil War end and what remained unresolved?

The war effectively ended when Charles I, fleeing Oxford ahead of Fairfax’s besieging army, surrendered to the Scottish Covenanter Army on May 5, 1646. Oxford itself fell to the New Model Army on June 24, 1646. Yet the conflict left enormous questions open: whether Charles would remain on the throne, whether the war had been fought over Parliamentary rights or religious reform, and what to do with a defeated but living king. These unresolved tensions directly sparked the Second English Civil War and ultimately Charles’s execution.

Sources

1. https://www.britannica.com/event/English-Civil-Wars
2. http://bcw-project.org/church-and-state/first-civil-war/index
3. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1939/causes-of-the-english-civil-wars/
4. https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/2013/09/001-the-kingdoms-of-charles-stuart.html
5. http://bcw-project.org/biography/sir-thomas-fairfax