|
The Third English Civil War (1649–1651) was the last of the English Civil Wars (1642–1651), a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists. The Preston campaign of the Second Civil War was undertaken under the direction of the Scots Parliament, not the Kirk, and it took the execution of King Charles I to bring about a union of all Scottish parties against the English Independents. Even so, Charles II in exile had to submit to long negotiations and hard conditions before he was allowed to put himself at the head of the Scottish armies. The Marquess of Huntly was executed for taking up arms for the king on 22 March 1649. The Marquess of Montrose, under the direction of Charles II, made a last attempt to rally the Scottish Royalists early in 1650. But Charles II merely used Montrose as a threat to obtain better conditions for himself from the Covenanters. When Montrose was defeated at the Battle of Carbisdale on 27 April, delivered up to his pursuers on 4 May, and executed on 21 May 1650, Charles II gave way to the demands of the Covenanters and placed himself at their head. Charles II now tried to regain the throne through an alliance with his father's former enemies in Scotland, who intended to impose Presbyterianism on England. He dismissed all the faithful Cavaliers who had followed him to exile.〔 As the Royal army was mostly Scottish, and as the invasion was not accompanied by any major rising or support in England, the war can also be viewed as being primarily an Anglo-Scottish War rather than a continuation of the English Civil War. ==Cromwell in Ireland== Ireland had been at war since the rebellion of 1641, with most of the island being controlled by the Irish Confederates. In 1648, in the wake of Charles I's arrest, and the growing threat to them from the armies of the English Parliament, the Confederates signed a treaty of alliance with the English Royalists. The joint Royalist and Confederate forces under Ormonde attempted to eliminate the Parliamentary army holding Dublin, but were routed at the battle of Rathmines by a Parliamentary army commanded by Colonel Michael Jones. As the former Member of Parliament Admiral Robert Blake blockaded Prince Rupert of the Rhine's fleet in Kinsale, Oliver Cromwell was able to land at Dublin on 15 August 1649 with the army to quell Royalist alliance in Ireland. The alliance, which was a compromise that gave command of the Irish Confederate forces to the English Royalists, was very shaky from the start, with many Confederates unhappy with the leadership of Ormonde. Indeed the Confederates had fought a mini civil war among themselves in 1648 over this alliance, with Owen Roe O'Neill's Ulster army leaving the Confederation and only re-joining it after Cromwell had actually landed in Ireland. Partly as a result of this disunity, the Irish/Royalist coalition was driven from eastern Ireland by Cromwell, who beat down all resistance by his skill, and even more by his ruthless severity, in a brief campaign of nine months (storming of Drogheda, 11 September, and of Wexford, 11 October, by Cromwell; capture of the Irish Confederate capital Kilkenny, 28 March 1650, and of Clonmel, 10 May).〔 At the end of May 1650 Cromwell turned over his command in Ireland to Henry Ireton and returned to England.〔 It took two more years of prolonged siege and guerrilla warfare, before the last major Irish resistance was ended, after the fall of Galway in late 1652. The last Confederate Catholic troops surrendered in mid-1653. ==English invasion of Scotland== Cromwell returned to England from Ireland, on the urgings of the Parliament, at the end of May 1650 in order to lead an army to Scotland, where the Covenanters had proclaimed Charles II as king of Great Britain, France and Ireland. On 26 June Fairfax, who had been anxious and uneasy since the execution of King Charles I, resigned the command-in-chief of the army to Cromwell, his lieutenant-general. The pretext, rather than the reason, of Fairfax's resignation was his unwillingness to lead an English army to reduce Scotland.〔 This important step had been resolved upon as soon as it was clear that Charles II would come to terms with the Covenanters. From this point the Third Civil War became a war of England against Scotland. Here at least the English Independents carried the whole of England with them. Few Englishman cared to accept a settlement at the hands of a victorious foreign army, and on 28 June 1650, five days after Charles II had sworn to the Covenant, the newly appointed Lord-General Oliver Cromwell was on his way to the Border to take command of the English army. About the same time a new militia act was passed that was destined to give full and decisive effect to the national spirit of England in the great final campaign of the war. Meanwhile the motto ''frappez fort, frappez vite'' was carried out at once by the regular forces. On 19 July, Cromwell made the final arrangements at Berwick-on-Tweed. Major-General Thomas Harrison, a gallant soldier and an extreme English Independent, a Fifth Monarchist, was to command the regular and auxiliary forces left in England, and to secure the Commonwealth against Royalists and Presbyterians. Cromwell took with him Lieutenant-General Charles Fleetwood and Major-General John Lambert, and his forces numbered about 10,000 foot and 5,000 horse. His opponent David Leslie (his comrade of Marston Moor) had a much larger force, but its degree of training was inferior, it was more than tainted by the political dissensions of the people at large, and it was, in great part at any rate, raised by forced enlistment. On 22 July, Cromwell crossed the river Tweed. He marched on Edinburgh by the sea coast, through Dunbar, Haddington and Musselburgh, living almost entirely on supplies landed by the fleet which accompanied him, for the country itself was incapable of supporting even a small army, and on 29 July, he found Leslie's army drawn up and entrenched in a position extending from Leith to Edinburgh.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Third English Civil War」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|