People, events and ideas of the British Civil Wars explored and explained by leading historians

Informing and informers were pervasive in successive governments’ attempts to maintain the security and stability of the English Republic between 1649 and 1660. Some members of the public felt that by informing on others they significantly and positively contributed to the security of the Interregnum Regimes. Indeed, many members of the public considered that informing ... Read more

In 1660, the Restoration of the Monarchy made the question of remembering and memorialising the English Revolution not only controversial, but also dangerous. In that year, the Act of Oblivion and Indemnity pardoned those other than the regicides who had rebelled against the crown during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum. The Act commanded the ... Read more

What was the landscape of rural England like, over which many of the battles of the Civil Wars were fought? How did these fields and woods shape the armies’ tactics and influence the outcomes of battles such as Naseby which would alter British, and even World, history? And how different is the remaining rural landscape ... Read more

Strategically located at the lowest bridging point of the River Trent, the market town of Newark in Nottinghamshire became the focus of one of the most sustained conflicts of the British Civil Wars. Staunchly Royalist, the town’s inhabitants were besieged by Parliamentary forces three times – in February 1643; again in February and March 1644; ... Read more

The experiences of the Montgomeryshire gentleman and lawyer, Edward Vaughan, provide a remarkable story of law, civil war and gentry life in mid seventeenth-century Wales. In this podcast Lloyd Bowen, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Cardiff, uncovers a rich narrative of how local enmities were shaped by national events. Born in ... Read more

William Cavendish, Earl and later Duke of Newcastle, was the foremost of the King’s aristocratic Generals. By 1643 he’d raised the largest Royalist army of the First Civil War. He was granted greater powers than any other regional royalist commander, and was able to raise his own taxes and coin money. He also dubbed 12 ... Read more

Pantomime villains, box office gold and famous (or infamous) shadowy figures of fiction and non-fiction, pirates are familiar stereotypes in popular media. But these common images hide a critically important group of men (and occasionally women) who were socially, economically and politically significant in shaping the European maritime empires of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. ... Read more

The inseparable intimate relationship between politics, production and trade in the years preceding the Civil Wars has often been underplayed or even ignored. However, historians now increasingly recognise that the links between occupation and religious beliefs were fundamentally important in nurturing opposition to the King and his government in the years prior to the Civil ... Read more