The english civil war

Sometime after the Long Parliament met in November 1640, a seamstress living in London called Katherine Chidley decided that she didn’t much like the way that a man was telling her how to do her Puritanism. So, taking advantage of the recent collapse in traditional censorship controls, she published a pamphlet, The Justification of the Independant Churches of Christ (1641), which challenged the writings of Thomas Edwards, a preacher, heresiographer and polemical hardman of English Presbyterianism. Over the course of 80 tightly printed pages, Chidley contended that Edwards’s religious vision was an authoritarian and sexist misreading of God’s plans for his people. Churches could gather as and where they pleased;

On 15 June 1645, as Thomas Fairfax’s soldiers picked over the scattered debris on the Naseby battlefield, they made a sensational discovery. Amid the corpses and musket balls, dismembered limbs and severed swords there nestled a carrying case of personal letters and papers. It was nothing less than the king’s private correspondence. The cache included letters between Charles I and his queen, Henrietta Maria – his always opened ‘My deare harte’ – which discussed in detail the tactics and strategies of the war. Never ones to miss a PR opportunity, the Parliamentary high command ordered that a selection should be published with a guiding commentary. The first editorial note got

‘The Wars of the Three Kingdoms’ is the best description of the devastating conflict that erupted in England, Ireland and Scotland during the 1640s and 1650s. While Britain lost 2.2 per cent of its population in the first world war, 4 per cent perished during these terrible 17th-century clashes. The kingdoms were, at the outset, Charles I’s. At a time when even a great leader would have struggled to navigate the political, religious and social torrents confronting him, the king was weak and apt to act on the latest advice he received; his only strengths were piety, art patronage and being a loving husband and father. When a ruler of