The Wars of the Three Kingdoms is the collective term for a series of conflicts fought between 1639 and 1653 in England, Scotland, and Ireland, then separate entities in a personal union under Charles I. They include the 1639 to 1640 Bishops' Wars, the First and Second English Civil Wars, the Irish Confederate Wars, the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland, and the Anglo-Scottish War of 1650–1652. They resulted in the execution of Charles I, the abolition of monarchy, and founding of the Commonwealth of England, a unitary state which controlled the British Isles until the Stuart Restoration in 1660.
Political and religious conflict between Charles I and his opponents dated to the early years of his reign. While the vast majority supported the institution of monarchy, they disagreed on who held ultimate authority. Royalists generally argued political and religious bodies were subordinate to the king, while most of their Parliamentarian opponents backed a limited form of constitutional monarchy. This was worsened by differences over religion and religious freedom. Reformed Protestants such as the English Puritans and Scottish Covenanters opposed the changes Charles tried to impose on the Protestant state churches of England and Scotland. In Ireland, the only one with a Catholic majority, the Irish Confederates wanted an end to anti-Catholic discrimination, greater self-governance, and a reversal of land grants to Protestant settlers.
The conflicts began with the Bishops' Wars of 1639–1640, when Scottish Covenanters who opposed Charles' religious reforms gained control of Scotland and briefly occupied northern England. Irish Catholics launched a rebellion in 1641, which developed into ethnic conflict with Protestant settlers. The Irish Catholic Confederation, formed to control the rebellion, held most of Ireland in the ensuing war against the Royalists, Parliamentarians, and Covenanters. Although all three agreed on the need to quell the rebellion, none trusted the other two with control of an army raised to do so. In August 1642, failure to break the resulting political deadlock sparked the First English Civil War, which pitted Royalists against both the Parliamentarians and their Covenanter allies in England and Wales.
The war in England ended when Charles surrendered to the Scots in 1646, but divisions among his opponents and his refusal to make significant political concessions caused a renewed outbreak of fighting in 1648. In the Second English Civil War, Parliamentarians again defeated the Royalists and a Covenanter faction called the Engagers. The Parliamentarian New Model Army then purged England's parliament of those who wanted to continue negotiations with the king. The resulting Rump Parliament approved his execution in January 1649 and founded the republican Commonwealth of England. In the Treaty of Breda, the Scots agreed to restore Charles II to the English throne, but were defeated in the 1650–1652 Anglo-Scottish war. Under Oliver Cromwell, the Commonwealth conquered Ireland and most Irish Catholic lands were seized. The British Isles became a united republic ruled by Cromwell and dominated by the army. There were sporadic uprisings until the monarchy was restored in 1660.
Nomenclature
The term Wars of the Three Kingdoms first appears in A Brief Chronicle of all the Chief Actions so fatally Falling out in the three Kingdoms by James Heath, published in 1662, but historian Ian Gentles argues "there is no stable, agreed title for the events....which have been variously labelled the Great Rebellion, the Puritan Revolution, the English Civil War, the English Revolution and… the Wars of the Three Kingdoms." It is generally used by modern historians who see the conflicts in each state as driven by overlapping but often distinct issues, rather than as mere background to the English Civil War, while others have labelled them the British Civil Wars.
Background
General
After 1541, monarchs of England styled their Irish territory as a Kingdom—replacing the Lordship of Ireland—and ruled there with the assistance of a separate Irish Parliament. Also, with the Laws in Wales Acts 1535 and 1542, Henry VIII integrated Wales more closely into the Kingdom of England. Scotland, the third separate kingdom, was governed by the House of Stuart.
By means of the English Reformation, King Henry VIII made himself head of the Protestant Church of England and outlawed Catholicism in England and Wales. In the course of the 16th century, Protestantism became intimately associated with national identity in England; Catholicism had come to be seen as the national enemy, particularly as it was embodied in the rivals France and Spain. Catholicism, however, remained the religion of most people in Ireland and for many Irish was an act of native resistance against the Tudor conquest of Ireland.
In the Kingdom of Scotland, the Protestant Reformation was a popular movement led by John Knox. The Scottish Parliament legislated for a national Presbyterian church—namely the Church of Scotland or the Kirk—and Mary, Queen of Scots, a Catholic, was forced to abdicate in favour of her son James VI of Scotland. James grew up under a regency disputed between Catholic and Protestant factions; when he took power, he aspired to be a "universal King", favouring the English Episcopalian system of bishops appointed by the king. In 1584, he introduced bishops into the Church of Scotland, but met with vigorous opposition, and he had to concede that the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland would continue to run the church.
The personal union of the three kingdoms under one monarch came about when King James VI of Scotland succeeded Elizabeth I to the English throne in 1603, when he also became King James I of England and of Ireland. In 1625, Charles I succeeded his father and marked three main concerns regarding England and Wales: how to fund his government, how to reform the church, and how to limit the English Parliament's interference in his rule. At that time, he showed little interest in his other two kingdoms, Scotland and Ireland.
Scotland
James VI remained Protestant, taking care to maintain his hopes of succession to the English throne. He duly became James I of England in 1603 and moved to London. James concentrated on dealing with the English court and Parliament, running Scotland through written instructions to the Privy Council of Scotland and controlling the Parliament of Scotland through the Lords of the Articles. He constrained the authority of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland and stopped it from meeting, then increased the number of bishops in the Church of Scotland. In 1618, he held a General Assembly and pushed through Five Articles of Episcopalian practices, which were widely boycotted.
After his death in 1625, James was succeeded by his son Charles I, who was crowned in Holyrood Palace, Edinburgh, in 1633, with full Anglican rites. Charles was less skillful and restrained than his father; his attempts to enforce Anglican practices in the Church of Scotland created opposition which reached a flashpoint when he introduced the Scottish Prayer Book, a revised version of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer. His confrontation with the Scots came to a head in 1639, when he tried and failed to coerce Scotland by military means during the Bishops' Wars.
England
Charles shared his father's belief in the Divine Right of Kings, and his persistent assertion of this standard seriously disrupted relations between the Crown and the English Parliament. The Church of England remained dominant, but a powerful Puritan minority, represented by about one third of Parliament, began to assert themselves; their religious precepts had much in common with the Presbyterian Scots.
The English Parliament and the king had repeated disputes over taxation, military expenditure, and the role of the Parliament in government. While James I had held much the same opinions as his son regarding Royal Prerogatives, he usually had enough discretion and charisma to persuade Parliamentarians to accept his thinking. Charles had no such skill and, faced with multiple crises during 1639–1642, he failed to prevent his kingdoms from sliding into civil war. When Charles approached Parliament to pay for a campaign against the Scots, they refused. They then declared themselves to be permanently in session—the Long Parliament—and soon presented Charles with a long list of civil and religious grievances requiring his remedy before they would approve any new legislation.
English overseas possessions
During the English Civil War, the English overseas possessions became highly involved. In the Channel Islands, the island of Jersey and Castle Cornet in Guernsey supported the King until a surrender with honour in December 1651.
Although the newer, Puritan settlements in North America, notably Massachusetts, were dominated by Parliamentarians, the older colonies to the south sided with the Crown. Friction between Royalists, most of whom were Anglican, and Puritans in Maryland came to a head in the Battle of the Severn. The Virginia Company's settlements, Bermuda and Virginia, as well as Antigua and Barbados, were conspicuous in their loyalty to the Crown. Bermuda's Independent Puritans were expelled, settling the Bahamas under William Sayle as the Eleutheran Adventurers. Parliament passed An Act for prohibiting Trade with the Barbadoes, Virginia, Bermuda and Antego in October, 1650 that prohibited all trade with the rebellious colonies of Barbados, Antigua, Bermuda, and Virginia, and granting permission to English privateers to seize any ships belonging to merchants, including foreigners, who traded with those colonies.
Far to the North, Bermuda's regiment of Militia and its coastal batteries prepared to resist an invasion that never came. Built-up inside the natural defence of a nearly impassable barrier reef, to fend off the might of Spain, these defences would have been a formidable obstacle for the Parliamentary fleet sent in 1651 under the command of Admiral Sir George Ayscue to subdue the trans-Atlantic colonies, but after the fall of Barbados, the Bermudians made a separate peace that respected the internal status quo. The Parliament of Bermuda avoided the Parliament of England's fate during The Protectorate, becoming one of the oldest continuous legislatures in the world.
Virginia's population swelled with Cavaliers during and after the English Civil War. Even so, Virginia Puritan Richard Bennett was made Governor answering to Cromwell in 1652, followed by two more nominal "Commonwealth Governors". The loyalty of Virginia's Cavaliers to the Crown was rewarded after the 1660 Restoration of the Monarchy when Charles II dubbed it the Old Dominion.
Ireland
Meanwhile, in the Kingdom of Ireland (proclaimed such in 1541 but only fully conquered for the Crown in 1603), tensions had also begun to mount. Thomas Wentworth, Charles I's Lord Deputy of Ireland, angered Catholics by enforcing new taxes while denying them full rights as subjects; he further antagonised wealthy Irish Catholics by repeated initiatives to confiscate and transfer their lands to English colonists. Conditions became explosive in 1639 when Wentworth offered Irish Catholics some reforms in return for their raising and funding an Irish army (led by Protestant officers) to put down the Scottish rebellion. The idea of an Irish Catholic army enforcing what many saw as already tyrannical government horrified both the Scottish and the English Parliaments, which in response threatened to invade Ireland.
Wars
Charles' initial failure to end the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640 quickly persuaded the antagonists that force could serve them better than negotiation. The imposition of Bishops and other Anglican practices to the Scottish Kirk were opposed by most Scots, who supported a Presbyterian system of governance led by a General Assembly, and in individual churches by ministers and committees of elders. The 1638 National Covenant pledged to oppose such imposed "innovations". Signatories were known as Covenanters.
In Ireland, alienated by Church of England domination and frightened by the rhetoric of the English and Scottish Parliaments, a small group of Irish conspirators launched the Irish Rebellion of 1641, ostensibly in support of the "King's Rights". The uprising featured widespread violent assaults on Protestant communities in Ireland, both Anglican and dissenter Protestants in Ulster whose practice was similar to the Scottish Kirk. In England and Scotland, rumours spread that the killings had the king's sanction, which, for many, foreshadowed their own fate if the king's Irish troops landed in Britain. Thus the English Parliament refused to pay for a royal army to put down the rebellion in Ireland; instead Parliament decided to raise its own armed forces. The king did likewise, rallying those Royalists (some of them members of Parliament) who believed their fortunes were best served by loyalty to the king.
The English Civil War ignited in 1642. Scottish Covenanters (as Presbyterians there called themselves) joined forces with the English Parliament in late 1643 and played a major role in the ultimate Parliamentary victory. Over the course of more than two years, the king's forces were ground down by the efficiency of those of Parliament, including the New Model Army, backed as they were by the financial muscle of the City of London. On 5 May 1646, at Southwell, Charles I surrendered to the Scottish army besieging Newark-on-Trent. What remained of the English and Welsh Royalist armies and garrisons, surrendered piecemeal over the next few months.
Meanwhile, the rebellious Irish Catholics formed their own government—Confederate Ireland—intending to help the Royalists in return for religious toleration and political autonomy. Troops from England and Scotland fought in Ireland, and Irish Confederate troops mounted an expedition to Scotland in 1644, sparking the Scottish Civil War. There, the Royalists gained a series of victories in 1644–1645, but were crushed after the main Covenanter armies returned to Scotland upon the end of the first English Civil War.
The Scots handed Charles over to the English and returned to Scotland, the English Parliament having paid them a large sum for their expenses in the English campaign. After his surrender, Charles was approached by the Scots, the Presbyterians in the English Parliament, and the Grandees of the New Model Army, all attempting to reach an accommodation with him and among themselves which would achieve peace while preserving the crown. But now, a breach between the New Model Army and Parliament widened day by day, until the Puritans in Parliament, with allies among the Scots and the remaining Royalists, saw themselves strong enough to challenge the Army, which began the Second English Civil War.