Worcester in 1651 closed England's civil wars with Parliament victorious
From 1642 to 1651, Royalists and Parliamentarians fought across England in wars nested inside the wider Wars of the Three Kingdoms. The first war ended in June 1646 with Charles I captive; the final act was Parliament's victory at Worcester on 3 September 1651.
The opening round was a dispute about how power should be shared between Charles I and Parliament. Most Parliamentarians who took up arms in 1642 wanted a guaranteed role in government, not the end of the monarchy. Winning the first war therefore created a new problem: the king refused to bargain, talks stalled, and moderates grew alarmed at radicals in the New Model Army such as Oliver Cromwell. Some of those moderates switched to an alliance with the Royalists, backed by the Scottish Covenanters. Their defeat in the Second Civil War of 1648 led to the king's execution in January 1649 and the creation of the Commonwealth of England.
Scotland then crowned Charles II in 1650, on condition that he establish Presbyterian churches in both kingdoms. The resulting Anglo-Scottish war, sometimes counted as a third civil war, ended at Worcester. Scotland and Ireland were folded into the Commonwealth, briefly making the British Isles a single state, an unpopular experiment that collapsed with the Restoration of the Stuarts in 1660. In the long run the wars pushed England and Scotland toward parliamentary monarchy.
The map of loyalty had a clear economic pattern. The king drew on the shires, the poorer north and west, Wales, and cathedral cities including York, Chester, Worcester and Oxford. Parliament held the ports, manufacturing towns and wealthier south and east; historian Lacey Baldwin Smith observed that populous, rich and rebellious regions tended to coincide. Many officers had learned their trade in continental conflicts such as the Dutch revolt against Spain and the Thirty Years' War.
Even the names are contested. After the Restoration people spoke of the rebellion or the great rebellion; Walter Scott called it the Great Civil War; Marxist historians such as Christopher Hill preferred English Revolution, and others argue for British Civil Wars, since Wales, Scotland and Ireland were all drawn in. The familiar nicknames began as insults. Cavalier shares a root with the Spanish caballero and had implied Spanish sympathies at Elizabeth I's court, while Roundhead mocked the cropped hair of some Puritans and London apprentices, even though commanders on both sides wore theirs much the same.
Source: English Civil War
