Customer Reviews

The Bishops' Wars: Charles I's Campaigns against Scotland, 1638-1640 (Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History)

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This is an interesting book about the prelude to the English Civil Wars. The episode ends with the summoning of the Long Parliament, which the King would in due course go to war with, and lose. Despite 80% of it being about the organization, financing and levying of the troops for the wars, and only the first 60 pages being about the campaigns themselves, I found it a really interesting read. During the course of it you will come to understand why the London merchant community, both domestic and foreign, sided with Parliament against the King in the Civil Wars; why there was no serious foreign help for the King during the Civil War (except for cash); why great swathes of the population tried to remain neutral on the outbreak of the Civil Wars - due to the King's abuses of the militia ordnances; and why, basically, they had to cut his head off. The surprising thing about the Civil Wars is that the King had any supporters at all; though a friend of mine pointed out that it was probably because nobody liked the Puritan Parliamentary leadership either - if they'd been a bit more human, they could probably just thrown the King straight into the Tower, or on a boat to France, as they later did with Charles's son James II. During the Civil War, Charles was accused of trying to bring a Catholic Irish army into England; well, he tried it in 1640 as well, though with just as much luck, but he did get a Spanish army from Flanders ready to invade Scotland, and if it hadn't have been for those pesky Dutch, he'd have got away with it too. And despite getting the loan of a Spanish army, he was planning on `borrowing' £300,000 of the King of Spain's gold kept in the Tower for paying the Army of Flanders - Charles minted the gold coins and shipped them to Flanders for the Spanish in order to avoid the Dutch blockade, in exchange for a percentage of the loot. He also had a scheme for debasing the English coinage in order to raise money for the war, which would have made a shilling worth 25% of its face value. There went the merchants' support. If you think the current government is bad, read this book. I borrowed it from a library. Hurry while we still have them.

From Page 1 - "In 1639-40 Charles I twice mobilized England and Wales to suppress a Scottish rebellion against his ecclesiastical and, by implication, his temporal policies. Between these campaigns the Short Parliament of April-May 1640 was convened, bringing into sharp focus the mistrust that had festered between Charles I and those he ruled. The Bishops' Wars, so-called because they were fought to uphold episcopacy in Scotland, demolished the myth of Caroline political consensus and revealed the gulf between King and country."

"England's inability to crush Scotland or even to prevent the invasion of the north by the army of the Covenanters, this book argues, was essentially a political failure which demonstrated Charles' inability to manage government. It was the King's maladministration of the institutions at his disposal, rather than structural failure within the institutions themselves, which precipitated failure in a war that was entirely of the King's choosing."

Page 60: "Conway realized that the tactical errors in themselves had not brought defeat. The repulse at Newburn and the abandonment of Newcastle did not lose the war. Rather, politics had doomed the campaign. The Crown's policies had brought about a major war without parliamentary financial assistance and with a depleted Exchequer. Making war without money had led to these straits. The design for an amphibious assault on Scotland had forced the Scots' hand and led to a land war for which the English were not prepared. They were unprepared because the King had not harnessed the might of England by establishing first a political consensus through parliament. The Covenanters' objective in 1640 was a military victory which would, after their consolidation of the north of England during August and September, force the King to a negotiated settlement through the agency of an English Parliament. Thus their ultimate goal was political."

"The remainder of this book attempts to explain how that `most shameful and confounding flight that was ever heard of' at Newburn came about. It will be seen that Charles expected too much from royal institutions, namely his councils, officers, Ordnance Office, Exchequer, and paymasters. Unrealistic expectations characterised the King's management of people and institutions. Still, both muddled through. The army came into being, twice. But the mobilization brought together men who were not armed or trained well enough for the task at hand, nor deployed properly. For that matter, the mobilization compounded Charles's political problems and once assembled the English army became as much a threat to England as to Scotland. The King managed armies about as well as he managed Parliaments."

The Contents are -
P001: The Events of the Bishop's Wars and Caroline Politics
- The First Bishop's War; The Second Bishop's War
P062: Institutions
- The Council of War; The chain of command; The Ordnance Office
P111: Military Finance
- The financial conditions of the crown; Loans and contributions; Coat-and-conduct money; The machinery of the Exchequer
P152: Reluctant Lords and Absent Mercenaries
- The summoning of the nobility; mercenaries: politics and money
P174: The Perfect Militia
- The political and historical context of militia service; The early Stuart militia; The militia in the Bishops' Wars
P215: Impressment and the Substitution Clause
- The political and the historical context of impressments; Early Stuart impressments in the Bishops' Wars; The substitution clause
P264: Riot, Iconoclasm, and Murder Amongst the Soldiery
P287: Conclusion
P300: Bibliography
P324: Index

Further Reading
The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603-1645 (History of Warfare)
An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585-1702
Exercise of Arms: Warfare in the Dutch Revolt (1568-1648) (History of Warfare)