Scotland in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms
Battle of Dunbar
| date | 1644 to 1650 |
|---|---|
| place | Scotland |
| output | Covenanters defeat royalists, but are themselves defeated by the English parliamentarians when they conquer Scotland |
| Parties to the conflict | |
|---|---|
| Commander | |
|
Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll , and David Leslie |
|
| Troop strength | |
| Fluctuating, 2000 to 4000 men | Over 30,000 men, many of them stationed in England and Ireland |
| losses | |
| A total of 28,000 deaths on both sides, many of them from illness, and approx. 45,000 civilians died from illness and scheduled killing | |
.svg){kind=small}
Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651) in Scotland
Newburn - Marston Moor - Tippermuir - Aberdeen (1644) - Inverlochy (1645) - Lagganmore - Auldearn - Carlisle (1645) - Alford - Kilsyth - Philiphaugh - Aberdeen (1646) - Rhunahaorine Moss - Dunaverty - Mauchline Muir - Preston (1648) - Whiggamore Raid - Stirling (1648) - Inverness (1649) - Inverness (1650) - Carbisdale - Dunbar (1650) - Inverkeithing - Worcester - Tullich
From 1644 to 1651, Scotland was involved in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms , a series of civil wars fought in Scotland, England and Ireland . These wars resulted from similar conflicts such as the Episcopal Wars fought between Scotland and England and the Irish Confederation Wars .
Scotland's own civil war, in which royalists fought against Covenanters , lasted from 1644 to 1645. The royalists, led by James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose , were partisans of King Charles I of England, while the Scottish Covenanters had been in Scotland Ruled in 1639, supported the English parliament in the fight against the king. The Scottish royalists were eventually defeated by the Covenanters, although luck was initially on the royalists' side. Aided by Irish troops, the royalists initially had a series of quick victories from 1644 to 1645.
However, the Covenanters soon became at odds with the English Parliament . They switched sides and now supported Charles II and his claim to the throne of England and Scotland. This led to the Third English Civil War, as a result of which Scotland was conquered and occupied by the parliamentary New Model Army under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell .
Causes of War - Wars in the Three Kingdoms
Scotland helped spark this series of wars when it rebelled against Charles I's religious policy in 1638. In order to counteract the innovations of Charles I, especially the introduction of a new prayer book, the National Covenant of Scotland was formulated. In addition, the covenant expressed a general Scottish dissatisfaction with Charles I's policies. Above all, since the Stuart kings had also become English monarchs in 1603, people felt sidelined in Scotland. The Covenanters put together a large army from the subordinates of their landed gentry and were able to successfully oppose Charles I in the so-called Episcopal Wars.
The Scottish uprising, in turn, sparked civil war in Charles I's other two kingdoms, first in Ireland, then in England. Karl and his minister Thomas Wentworth could not get Parliament to approve funds for an army to bring down the Scots. The parliament was dissatisfied with the domestic and religious policy of Charles I himself. This led the king and his minister to raise an army of Irish Catholics who, in return, promised to reverse the discriminatory laws in Ireland. This development alarmed the opponents of Charles I in England and Scotland, and the Scottish Covenanters threatened to invade Ireland. A group of Irish conspirators then began the Irish Rebellion of 1641 , which quickly led to a series of massacres in Ireland among English and Scottish settlers of Protestant faith.
This in turn fueled the civil war in England, because the Long Parliament refused the king's command of the army in order to put down the Irish rebellion , since it feared the use of the army against itself. Thus, in 1642 the English Civil War broke out.
In 1642 the Scottish Covenanters sent an army to Ulster , Ireland, to protect the Scottish settlers there. With the agreements in the Solemn League and Covenant treaty that the Covenanters made with the English Parliament, the Covenanters' forces were sent south in 1644 to fight on Parliament's side in the English Civil War.
Scottish royalists
Some Scots, however, sided with the king. This happened in a conspicuous way especially in the Highlands and in the Scottish Northeast. There were various reasons why there was a tendency towards royalism. Most of them had something to do with religion, with culture, with clan politics and political loyalty.
The Covenanters established Presbyterianism as the state religion in Scotland, although some people in the north and in the Highland regions were Episcopal or Roman Catholic .
Furthermore, the Highlands were a special cultural, political and economic region. They were characterized by the predominant Gaelic language and their own customs and at that time were still outside the control of the English and Scottish governments. Some Highland clans preferred the aloof authority of Charles Stuart over the powerful, well-organized government of the Covenanters, administered from the Scottish Lowlands .
The largest Highland clan, the Campbells , however, led by its chief Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll , sided with the Covenanters. In the harsh world of clan politics, this consequently meant that the Campbell's rivals, especially the MacDonalds , switched to the other side. It should also be noted that some of these factors were superimposed: the MacDonalds, for example, were Catholics, sworn enemies of the Campbells, and had a deep-rooted Gaelic consciousness (in Ireland as in Scotland).
Finally, there were also partisans who came from the Lowlands and were also Presbyterians, but considered vassal loyalty to the king to be more important than religious or political principles or, like James Graham, 1st Marquess of Montrose, for fundamental constitutional considerations of a dictatorship of the church as it was sought by the Covenanters, who preferred the established monarchy.
The Irish Intervention
In 1644, Graham was commissioned by the king to retake Scotland for the crown. He found allies for this in Ireland. The Catholic Confederation of Kilkenny dispatched a force consisting mostly of Ulstermen and MacDonalds who had emigrated to Ulster. From their point of view, a campaign in Scotland tied the Scottish troops of the Covenanters, who would otherwise be deployed in Ireland or England. The Irish sent 1,500 men to Scotland under the orders of Alasdair MacColla MacDonald. They also included Manus O'Cahan and his 500-strong regiment. Shortly after landing, they joined Montrose at Blair Atholl , and together they advanced to meet the MacDonald forces and other anti-Campbells Highland clans.
Led by Montrose and MacColla, the new royalist army was quite impressive. Her Irish and Highland troops were extremely agile and made quick progress over long distances - even over the rugged, impassable Highland terrain. They were able to survive in difficult conditions and with poor food rations. Instead of fighting in the conventional pike and musket formations that were common in most armies at the time, they launched quick attacks, firing their muskets at a narrow target before attacking it with swords drawn and half pikes. With this tactic they swept away the poorly trained Covenanters militias that were sent to meet them. In view of the terrible Highlander attacks, the Covenanters often fled quickly and were literally butchered by the Highlanders while they were still running.
On the other hand, the clans could not be convinced to fight further away from home - they saw their main enemy in the Campbells rather than the Covenanters. The royalists had no cavalry , which made them easily vulnerable in the open. Although they won a number of victories, they were unable to hold conquered territories, so these were quickly recaptured and fell to the Campbells, allied with the Covenanters.
Tippermuir, Aberdeen and Inverlochy
In the autumn of 1644 the royalists marched across the Highlands towards Perth , where they put down a Covenanter force at the Battle of Tippermuir . Shortly thereafter, at the Battle of Aberdeen, another Covenanters militia suffered a similar fate. After their conquest, Montrose unwisely had Perth and Aberdeen plundered by its soldiers, although the area was home to many royalist supporters who were lost to the king's cause after the looting.
In a rush of victory, MacColla insisted on resuming the MacDonalds' war against the Campbells in Argyll in western Scotland . In December 1644, they raged in the Campbells land, killing over 900 military-age male civilians and burning their homesteads.
In response to the attack, Archibald Campbell, 1st Marquess of Argyll , called his clan together to repel the invaders. At the Battle of Inverlochy near Ben Nevis in Lochaber in February 1645, the Campbell clan met the royalist forces and those of the Highlanders. The Campbells suffered heavy losses and were destroyed.
The forces of Montrose, especially the men of the MacDonald clan and those of the Irish allies, gained a bad name among the general Scottish population. They were charged with atrocities against enemy civilians, particularly during their campaign in the Campbells area in Argyll. After MacColla's separation from Montrose's army (see below), the MacDonalds began a campaign of destruction against the Campbells, whereby it must be noted that the Covenanters' troops behaved equally badly in the Highlands, in the north-east of Scotland and in Ulster on royalist or allied territory and repeatedly massacred the wives and children of their enemies who fell into their hands after the battle.
Triumph and disaster for the royalists
With their victory in Inverlochy, the royalists controlled the western highlands, whose clans and nobles soon sided with the royalists. The most important among them were the Gordons , who first made cavalry available to the royalists.
The Covenanters hurriedly assembled a new army and sent it to meet the royalists. But she was beaten at Auldearn near Nairn . Another army of the Covenanters was wiped out by Montrose's soldiers at the Battle of Alford . A fourth army of the Covenanters, intended to prevent the royalists from successfully penetrating the Scottish Lowlands, met the same fate as its predecessor at the Battle of Kilsyth . She was beaten.
This series of losing battles resulted from the mistake of hastily sending semi-trained or untrained troops into battle, and it resulted in Montrose temporarily controlling most of Scotland. In late 1645, famous cities such as Dundee and Glasgow fell to his forces.
When Montrose wanted to raise troops in Scotland's south-east and planned the march on England, MacColla showed that his priorities lay solely in the confrontation with the Campbells. He occupied Argyll with his troops. The Gordons also turned back to defend their own land in the northeast. Montrose, who had split up his forces, was weakened and defeated by the Covenanters at the Battle of Philiphaugh . The victorious Covenanters under General David Leslie, Lord Newark then carried out a massacre of Irish soldiers who had surrendered to them in return for an assurance of sparing, and hunted down the women and children of the Irish entourage who fled. MacColla retired to the Kintyre Peninsula , where he stayed until the next year.
The royalist victories in Scotland became meaningless in one fell swoop when the completely different troops began to pursue their own interests and war aims.
The end of the civil war in Scotland
In May 1646 Charles I gave up his now hopeless fight and faced the Scottish Covenanters. This ended the first English Civil War. The Covenanters tried to convert the king to covenantism, but failed. So at the beginning of 1647 they handed it over to the representatives of the English Parliament. For the service of their troops in England they received an advance payment, whereupon the Scottish army withdrew from England to the north. Montrose left for Norway in 1646 , while MacColla returned to Ireland with his remaining Irish and Highlanders to rejoin the Confederates. All those who fought for Montrose, especially the Irish, were killed by the Covenanters as soon as they were captured in retaliation for the atrocities committed by the royalists in Argyll.
Scotland and the Second and Third English Civil Wars
The Second English Civil War
Although the Covenanters had fought the royalists at home, they negotiated with Charles I against the English Parliament. They failed to come to an agreement with their former allies on a political and religious settlement of the wars because they failed with the introduction of Presbyterianism as the official state religion in the three kingdoms and also believed that the parliamentarians would threaten Scottish independence. Many of the Covenanters feared that under Parliament our poor country would be made a province of England.
A group among the Covenanters known as the Engagers , led by James Hamilton, 1st Duke of Hamilton , sent an army to England in 1648 to restore Charles I to the throne. However, they were defeated by Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army at the Battle of Preston . This intervention in favor of the king caused a brief civil war within the Covenanters movement. The more radical Presbyterians under the Earl of Argyll rebelled against the main Scottish army under David Leslie. The two groups clashed at the Battle of Stirling in September 1648 , before hurrying to negotiate peace.
In 1649 the rump parliament had Charles I executed. Soon after him, Hamilton, who was caught after the Battle of Preston, was also executed. So in Scotland the main armed forces were the extreme Covenanters, still led by Argyll.
Defeat and death of Montrose
In June 1649, Charles II reinstated Montrose as Lord Lieutenant in Scotland. He also began negotiations with the Covenanters, now ruled by the radical Presbyterian " Kirk Party " (or " Whigs "). Because Montrose found little support in the Scottish Lowlands anyway , Charles II, in order to become king, was ready to deny his loyal servant on the terms dictated by the Covenanters.
In March 1650, Montrose landed in Orkney and took command of a small force, which consisted largely of mercenaries from the European continent and had already been sent ahead by him. While crossing the mainland, he tried in vain to call the clans to arms. On April 27th, he was caught by surprise and defeated at the Battle of Carbisdale in Ross-Shire. After some wandering around, he surrendered to Macleod of Assynt, to whom he confided completely because he misjudged his political opposition. He was taken to Edinburgh as a prisoner and sentenced to death by Parliament on May 20th. Although Montrose asserted prior to his execution that he was a true covenanter and a loyal subject, he was hanged on May 21 with a copy of his biography, written by Wishart , around his neck , which praised him.
The third civil war
Despite their quarrel with the Scottish royalists, the Covenanters pledged themselves to the Charles II cause and signed the Treaty of Breda (1650) in the hope of an independent Presbyterian Scotland free from English interference. Charles II landed in Scotland at Garmouth in Moray on June 23, 1650 and immediately signed the Covenant of 1638 and the Solem League of 1643 after entering the mainland.
The threat posed by King Charles II and his new Covenanter allies was seen as the greatest challenge in the young English Republic, so Oliver Cromwell returned to England in May , leaving it to his lieutenants in Ireland to continue the repression of the Irish royalists. He arrived in Scotland on July 22, 1650 and advanced along the east coast towards Edinburgh. Towards the end of August his army was so weakened by illness and a lack of supplies that he had to order a retreat to his base, the port of Dunbar. Meanwhile, a Scottish army of Covenanters, under the command of David Leslie, had watched his advance. When Leslie saw Cromwell bring some of the sick aboard the ships waiting there, he prepared to attack. He probably thought he was facing a weakened enemy. However, some historians also report that he acted against his better judgment and received the order to fight from the general assembly of the Covenanters. Cromwell took the opportunity. In the subsequent Battle of Dunbar (1650) , the New Model Army inflicted a crushing defeat on the Scots on September 3. Leslie's army, which had strong ideological ties to the radical Kirk Party , was wiped out, leaving over 14,000 dead, wounded and prisoners. Cromwell's army then took Edinburgh. At the end of the year his army was largely occupying southern Scotland.
This military disaster discredited the radical Covenanters known as the Kirk Party and prompted the Covenanters and Scottish royalists to at least temporarily bury their mutual differences and to halt and repel the English parliamentary invasion of Scotland. In December 1650, the Scottish Parliament passed the Act of Levy , the Law on Recruits, according to which every town and county had to raise a certain number of soldiers. Further recruiting took place in the Highlands and Lowlands to form a regular national army, named the Army of the Kingdom , and placed under the personal command of Charles II. Although the Kingdom's army was the largest military force to date fielded on the Scottish side during the Civil Wars, it was poorly trained. Their morale was also bad, because individual units had previously fought each other as covenanters and as royalists to the death.
In July 1651, parts of the Cromwell forces, led by General John Lambert, crossed the Firth of Forth at Fife and defeated the Scots at the Battle of Inverkeithing . The New Model Army was marching towards the royal camp in Perth . In danger of being strategically circumvented, Charles II ordered his army south to England in a last desperate attempt to avoid Cromwell and spark a royalist uprising there. Cromwell followed Charles II to England and left George Monck in Scotland to continue the campaign there. On August 14th, Monck took Stirling . Dundee followed on September 1 , with Monck, it is said, murdered up to 2,000 of Dundee's 12,000 residents and wiped out every ship in the city's port, 60 in total.
The kingdom's Scottish army marched to the west because that was the area where sympathy for the royalists was strongest. Though some royalists joined the army, their numbers were nowhere near as many as Charles II and his Scottish supporters had hoped. At the Battle of Worcester , Cromwell finally defeated the new king on September 3, 1651: 3,000 men were killed and over 10,000 captured. Many of the Scots captured by Cromwell were sold as slave labor in the West Indies, Virginia and Berwick, Maine. This defeat marked the end of the Scottish war effort. Charles II fled to the European continent, and with his escape the hopes of the Covenanters for political independence from the Commonwealth of England were shattered.
From the occupation to the restoration
See main article: Royalist uprisings from 1651 to 1654
Between 1651 and 1654 there was a royalist revolt in Scotland. Dunnottar Castle was the last fortress to fall to parliamentary troops in May 1652. Under the terms of the Tender of Union , the Scots were given 30 seats in the United Parliament in London, and General Monck was appointed Military Governor of Scotland. During the interregnum, Scotland remained under British military occupation. During the entire era of the Commonwealth, there were isolated royalist rebellions in Scotland, especially in the western highlands, where Alasdair MacColla had assembled his forces in the 1640s . The north-west of the Highlands was the scene of another royalist uprising from 1653 to 1655, which could only be put down by the dispatch of 6,000 English soldiers. Monck distributed forts across the Highlands, for example in Inverness , and put an end to royalist resistance by taking prisoners as slaves to the West Indies. Lawlessness remained a problem, however. There were robbers known as mosstrooper , ex-soldiers of both the royalists and the covenanters, who plundered English troops and native populations alike.
After the death of Oliver Cromwell in 1658, those parties and interest groups that had fought for supremacy in the early years of the interregnum reappeared. Now Monck, who had served Cromwell and the English Parliament faithfully throughout the Civil War, decided that his interests and those of the country would best be served with the restoration of kingship. In 1660 he led his troops to England to restore the monarchy. Under this so-called Stuart Restoration , the Scottish Parliament and independent Scottish legislation were restored, but many problems that had led to the wars, such as questions of religion, the Scottish government and the status of the Highlands, remained unsolved. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, they gave rise to many more Scots dying in the Jacobite revolts .
The balance
It is believed that approximately 28,000 people were killed in action in Scotland during the wars of the Three Kingdoms themselves. At that time, however, more soldiers usually died from disease than in combat (the ratio was usually 3 to 1), so it is more reasonable to assume that the real military death rate in this case is much higher. In addition, it is estimated that as a direct result of this war, either through massacre or disease, 15,000 civilians lost their lives. As an indirect result of the war, another 30,000 people died of epidemics in Scotland between 1645 and 1649, because some of them were spread through the country through troop movements. If we add the thousands of Scottish Army personnel who died in the civil wars in England and Ireland (another 20,000 soldiers), the wars of the three kingdoms represent one of the bloodiest episodes in Scottish history.
literature
- David Stephenson: Highland Warrior: Alasdair MacColla and the Civil Wars. John Donald, Edinburgh 1980, 2003.
- John Kenyon, Jane Ohlmeyer (eds.): The Civil Wars: A Military History of England, Scotland and Ireland, 1638-1660. Oxford University Press, 1998. (The chapter on the Scottish Civil War was written by Edward Furgol.)