Characters

"A few honest men are better than numbers. If you choose godly, honest men to be captains of Horse, honest men will follow them."

The most consequential Englishman of the seventeenth century began the war as an obscure country gentleman and MP for Cambridge, aged forty-three, with no military experience. Within three years he had become the finest cavalry commander in England; within six he had executed a king; within a decade he ruled three kingdoms as Lord Protector. His genius lay in combining religious intensity with ruthless practical intelligence — he trained his cavalry to rally after their charge rather than pursue, a discipline that won Marston Moor and Naseby. He was capable of extraordinary mercy and extraordinary cruelty, often in the same campaign. His massacres at Drogheda and Wexford remain a defining trauma of Irish memory; his relatively liberal religious policy toward Jews and nonconformist Protestants was far ahead of its time. He died of malaria in 1658, having refused the crown, uncertain whether he was God's instrument or England's tyrant.

"I go from a corruptible to an incorruptible Crown, where no disturbance can be, no disturbance in the world."

Charles I was a king of genuine personal dignity, genuine aesthetic sensibility, and genuine political incompetence — a combination that cost him his head. His belief in the divine right of kings was absolute and sincere: God had appointed him, and no earthly power could call him to account. He governed for eleven years without Parliament (the Personal Rule, 1629–1640), raising money by dubious means and enforcing religious conformity that infuriated both Scottish Presbyterians and English Puritans. When forced to recall Parliament he proved unable to compromise honestly — he would concede, then scheme to recover what he had conceded, then deny that he had conceded it. His captured correspondence at Naseby revealed him negotiating with Irish Catholics and foreign princes while presenting himself to his English subjects as a Protestant defender. Even so, his bearing at his trial and execution was magnificent: he died better than he had ruled. The cult of King Charles the Martyr, promoted by the book 'Eikon Basilike' published the day of his execution, would haunt English politics for decades.

"I have but one ambition: to see England settled and at peace, and then retire from public life forever."

Thomas Fairfax was arguably the finest battlefield commander of the war — and one of the few major figures to emerge from it with both his honour and his conscience intact. The son of a Yorkshire parliamentary lord, he was a professional soldier trained in the Dutch wars before commanding Parliament's northern forces alongside his father. When Parliament created the New Model Army in 1645, Fairfax was the obvious choice for Captain-General at thirty-three: energetic, genuinely brave (he was repeatedly wounded), respected by all factions, and possessed of a rare quality in that era of fanatics — moderation. He won Naseby and reduced Oxford, but refused to sit on the court that tried Charles I, signing his name against the verdict. In 1660 he used the army to facilitate the Restoration of Charles II, having come to believe the Republic had failed. He spent his last years writing poetry on his Yorkshire estate.

"God and my sword — what else should a soldier need?"

Prince Rupert was the war's most dazzling figure: tall, dark, handsome, twenty-three years old when the war began, the King's nephew and a veteran of continental warfare. His cavalry charges at Edgehill and in the early campaigns were devastating — great walls of horsemen thundering downhill that scattered Parliamentary infantry and cavalry alike. His problem was the same as his glory: he could not stop his cavalry once they charged. They routed the Parliamentary flank at Edgehill — and then galloped two miles in pursuit while the infantry battle was decided without them. The same at Naseby. He was not unintelligent — he argued against the battle at Marston Moor as too risky — but he could not impose his discipline on his horse as Cromwell could. After the war he turned to naval command and science, becoming a founding Fellow of the Royal Society. He invented mezzotint engraving. He was, perhaps, a man who would have been better suited to a less catastrophic century.

"The Parliament is the soul of the kingdom, the intelligence that moveth all the rest."

John Pym was the architect of the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I — the man who transformed scattered grievances into organized resistance, and resistance into war. As the dominant figure in the Long Parliament from 1640 onward, he orchestrated the impeachment of the King's ministers, the Root and Branch Petition against bishops, and crucially the Solemn League and Covenant that brought Scotland into the war on Parliament's side. He was a master of parliamentary procedure, parliamentary propaganda, and political intelligence — Charles attempted to arrest him in the Five Members affair of January 1642, which backfired catastrophically. 'King Pym,' his opponents called him, partly in mockery and partly in genuine recognition of his power. He died of cancer in December 1643, mercifully before the conflict's most terrible chapters, and was buried in Westminster Abbey — only to be exhumed and thrown in a pit at the Restoration.

"I am not wedded and glued to forms of government. That which I desire is that the people of England may have freedom and peace."

Henry Ireton was Cromwell's closest political collaborator and, from 1646, his son-in-law (marrying Cromwell's daughter Bridget). A lawyer-turned-soldier, he combined genuine military ability — he was wounded at Naseby — with considerable theoretical intelligence. His debates with the Levellers in the Putney Debates of 1647 (where he argued against universal male suffrage, fearing it would destabilize property rights) reveal a man wrestling seriously with the era's radical political questions. He was one of the driving forces behind Pride's Purge and the trial of Charles I, whose death warrant he signed. As Lord Deputy of Ireland he prosecuted the brutal conquest of that country with Cromwell-like energy, dying of plague at the siege of Limerick in 1651. Like Cromwell, his body was exhumed at the Restoration and subjected to posthumous execution.

"In necessary things, unity; in doubtful things, liberty; in all things, charity."

Richard Baxter is the great chronicler of the English Civil War — a Puritan minister who served as army chaplain and then spent decades writing his 'Reliquiae Baxterianae' (published posthumously 1696), the most vivid and thoughtful firsthand account of what it felt like to live through the upheaval. He was not a typical Puritan: too moderate to please the radicals, too nonconformist to please the Royalists, he was imprisoned after the Restoration and hounded for years. His account of the war's causes, its conduct, and its consequences has a psychological depth absent from most contemporary records — he was interested in why people believed what they believed, and in the human cost of dogmatic certainty. His pastoral work in Kidderminster, where he served before and after the war, helped shape the tradition of English nonconformity that would eventually produce Methodism and the free churches.

"He was the most just, the most generous, the most tender, the most affectionate soul that ever breathed."

Lucy Hutchinson wrote one of the greatest English prose works of the seventeenth century: 'Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson,' an account of her husband's life and the wars that surrounded it, addressed to her children. Her husband John was governor of Nottingham Castle for Parliament throughout the First Civil War, and one of the regicides who signed Charles I's death warrant. Lucy's account of the war combines sharp political analysis with intimate domestic detail and fierce partisan passion — she despised compromise and regarded those who worked for the Restoration as apostates. She is also remarkable for her self-portrait: educated, formidably intelligent, capable of writing in both Latin and Greek, and deeply aware of the constraints her era placed on women. When her husband was arrested after the Restoration and died in Sandown Castle prison in 1664, she turned her grief and her genius into the Memoirs, which circulated in manuscript for over a century before first publication in 1806.

"It is not safe for a general to resist the will of the nation."

George Monck's career is one of the most extraordinary of the century: a professional soldier who began as a Royalist officer, was captured at the siege of Nantwich (1644) and imprisoned in the Tower of London, and eventually accepted Parliamentary service in Ireland and Scotland. Under the Republic and Protectorate he proved one of Parliament's most reliable commanders — an efficient, disciplined officer who combined military competence with a soldier's pragmatic disinterest in ideology. When Richard Cromwell's Protectorate collapsed in 1659 and England seemed on the verge of chaos, Monck marched his Scottish army south, dissolved the Rump Parliament, issued writs for a free Parliament, and engineered the peaceful Restoration of Charles II. He did this not out of Royalist conviction but out of a soldier's sense that England needed stable government. Charles II made him Duke of Albemarle. He had sailed through the most turbulent decades of English history without once being on the losing side at the moment that mattered.

"I have been for too long a time in a strange country and I am wonderfully pleased to be in England again."

Charles II was eleven years old when his father raised his standard at Nottingham, and twenty-one when he watched his last army destroyed at Worcester and began six weeks of desperate fugitive adventure across England — hiding in an oak tree, sleeping in haystacks, carried by fishing boat to France — before beginning nine years of impoverished exile at various European courts. He was tall, dark, intelligent, and had learned from watching his father's inflexible dignity destroy everything they had: he would be flexible, charming, and patient. When he returned to England in 1660 it was on Parliament's terms. His reign was one of pragmatic and sometimes cynical negotiation — he declared himself Catholic on his deathbed, the secret he had kept his whole reign. The Merry Monarch, his subjects called him; he had twenty known illegitimate children and no legitimate heir, a combination that would produce the constitutional crisis of the Exclusion Crisis and ultimately the Glorious Revolution after his death.