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Introduction | Soldiers | Prisoners | Mobs and mob violence
Citizens | Sacks and sieges | The aftermathThe aftermath
Ghostly armies
In early 1643, numerous sightings were made by responsible citizens of ghostly armies fighting in the skies near the battlefield of Edgehill – some witnesses claimed to have recognised among the phantoms men killed during the battle (which had been fought the previous October). Their claims were supported by royal courtiers sent by the king from Oxford and publicised in two pamphlets entitled A New Year’s Wonder and Great Wonder in Heaven.
The contemporary explanation for these phenomena was that they were a sign of divine displeasure. A modern explanation is that these visions may have been a symptom of the psychological as well as political disruption being experienced by the English.
Haunted castle
Hopton Castle in Shropshire, where a massacre occurred in 1644 (see Prisoners), is said to be haunted by the ghosts of the murdered Parliamentarian garrison, as well as by four of the Royalist soldiers who died during the siege. The widow of one of the dead, a young woman named Elizabeth Mayrick, is also said to haunt the ruins, crying out for her lost love.
Locally, the massacre made the castle itself infamous, a building dogged by bad luck. Perhaps this is why the remains of the fortress are largely as they were left in 1644 – taking into account centuries of neglect. Castle ruins were usually plundered and the stone used to build new buildings in the area. This didn't happen with Hopton.
Migration
From the 1640s to the 1660s, 20,000 people – mostly from the south and west of England – migrated to the North American colony of Virginia. Many of them did so simply to make new lives for themselves in the new world, but a substantial number also left to escape the Puritans. After the civil wars, another group of about 20,000 people – mostly from the Midlands and the north-west – migrated to the Delaware Bay (Pennsylvania and West Jersey). These were Quakers who had declared themselves opposed to the war.
These individuals – and the equal number of Puritans who had fled persecution before the wars and emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay colony – brought with them their culture, religion, world views, ideas about the structure of society, estate sizes, houses, views on child rearing and so on. As a result, the English civil wars and the issues surrounding them had a very profound effect on US history and development – and those issues were to be the basis of further conflict on that side of the Atlantic.
Destitution
In the west of England, the lingering effects of the war were constantly visible. A third of the people in Gloucester were homeless, a quarter in Bridgwater and two thirds in Taunton. Hundreds of maimed soldiers and destitute widows submitted petitions to the county quarter sessions in the hope of gaining some relief. Fields lay abandoned, bridges remained broken down and road surfaces were virtually unusable.
In 1646, on the anniversary of the relief of Taunton from siege, the minister George Newton delivered a special sermon, commenting on all he saw around him:
[Taunton’s] heaps of rubbish, her consumed houses, a multitude of which are raked in their own ashes. Here a poor forsaken chimney and there a little fragment of a wall that have escaped to tell what barbarous and monstrous wretches there have been.
Philosophy
In 1660, Thomas Hobbes, the English political philosopher, wrote Leviathan, in which he justified Cromwell's dictatorship at the end of the English Civil Wars by presenting a picture of primitive humans in a state of nature. According to Hobbes, ‘Leviathan’ is a world of unceasing warfare where every person's hand is raised against every other. 'There were very few of the common people that cared much for either of the causes,' he wrote, looking back on the Civil Wars.
Regicides
In August 1660, the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion was passed. This granted of a free pardon to anyone who had supported the Commonwealth government. However, Charles II retained the right to punish anyone who had participated in his father’s trial and execution.
A special court was appointed, and in October, those regicides who were still alive and in Britain were brought to trial. Ten were found guilty and were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. Others who had not been directly involved were also executed.
The traitors executed were Scroop, Cook and Jones. I did not see their execution, but met their quarters mangled and cut and reeking as they were brought from the gallows in baskets.
John Evelyn, Diary, 17 October 1660Oliver Cromwell and three others were posthumously tried for high treason and found guilty. In January 1661, their corpses were exhumed and hung in chains at Tyburn. An estimated 20 regicides escaped abroad: three of them were captured and were executed in April 1662.
Plague | Fire | War | Treason | Travel guide | History
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