We Americans can’t get enough of our Civil War. There’s even a Civil War book club: you can read entire books about a single general, entire books about a single battle, and even entire books about a single general at a single battle. The English also had a Civil War, but I could not name you a single battle or a single general. I’m not even sure they had generals. What they had was roundheads and cavaliers.
I’d read C.V. Wedgwood’s history of The Thirty Years War a few years ago. If she was able to wrestle a coherent narrative out of that colossal mess, I was pretty confident that she could make the English Civil War interesting. She covers the war in three volumes: The King’s Peace, The King’s War, and A Coffin for King Charles.
Though the period described in this first volume was largely peaceful in a literal sense, it was not a happy time for King Charles I, nor for his kingdom. It was a time of political infighting, factions searching for ways to deceive and outmaneuver each other. It was much like our own time in this regard, and it is good to be reminded that unchecked rancorous partisanship can actually destroy a nation.
It’s interesting to consider that religious wars are often wars between different factions within a larger religious tradition, rather than wars between completely different religions. Think Shites vs. Sunnis, or Catholics vs. Protestants in 20th century Ireland. And yet it’s never *just* religion—the greatest enmities seem to blend religion with other grievances. In the case of 17th century England, Charles I certainly had Catholic sympathies—his wife was a Catholic princess from France. But he was also rather mediaeval in his world view and seemed to view efforts to resist his attempt to enforce doctrinal purity and higher taxes as though they were the pranks of disobedient children. He also tended to bluff and overplay his hand, and in The King’s Peace he seems to botch just about every important confrontation or negotiation. It’s almost funny at times, and if we have any sympathy for him, it’s because of his complete ineptitude.
Opposing the king were devout and no-nonsense protestants. Disputes could be about substantial issues, but they could also be about matters such as the placement of altars during church services. The protestants didn’t like mysticism and they didn’t like being told how to worship. This kind of plainspoken self-sufficiency seems noble in a certain light, but knowing how this tradition has evolved over the centuries into the hermetic intolerant sects of the American South dilutes our sympathy somewhat. In fact, it is rather hard to find anyone to “root for” in this book.
The king’s nemesis is one John Pym, an unassuming bureaucrat but also a master tactician, who bests the king again and again during the so-called Long Parliament of 1640. By the end of the book we feel as though we are watching a chess match in which one the players has already lost a significant number of key pieces. The game may drag on for a while, but already the outcome is foregone. It will be interesting to find out how Charles manages to hang onto his head for another 500 pages or so.
