Civil wars involving the states and peoples of Europe

"I know of no one in the realm who would not more fitly to come to me than I to him."

"By God's blood, thy father slew mine, and so will I do thee and all thy kin."

"Who that woll make ony more lette hym seke other bookis kynge Arthure or of sir Launcelot and sir Trystrams; for this was drawen by a knyght presoner, sir Thomas Malleoré, that God send him good recover."

"Men look after they wot not what, but men buy harness fast; the King's menial men and the Duke of Clarence's are many in this town."

"Somewhat musing And more mourning, In remembering Th’unsteadfastness; This world being Of such wheeling, Me contrarying, What may I guess?I fear, doubtless, Remediless Is now to seize My woeful chance; For unkindness, Withoutenless, And no redress, Me doth advance.With displeasure, To my grievance, And no surance Of remedy; Lo, in this trance, Now in substance, Such is my dance, Willing to die.Methinks truly Bounden am I, And that greatly, To be content; Seeing plainly Fortune doth wry All contrary From mine intent.My life was lent Me to one intent. It is nigh spent. Welcome Fortune! But I ne went Thus to be shent But she it meant: Such is her won."

"The first thing we do, ."

"England hath long been mad and scarred herself, The brother blindly shed the brother’s blood, The father rashly slaughtered his own son, The son, compelled, been butcher to the sire; All this divided York and Lancaster."

"The joyning of the Red-Rose with the White, Did set our State into a Damask plight."

"Above, below, the rose of snow, Twined with her blushing foe, we spread: The bristled boar in infant-gore Wallows beneath the thorny shade."

"The English Civil War occupies a strange niche in contemporary memory. To all official appearances, no episode of the country’s modern past is so parenthetical. Leaving no reputable trace in common traditions or public institutions, it looks in established retrospect like a blackout in the growth of the collective psyche. Our only republic remains under ban, a historical freak. Rosebery could raise a statue to Cromwell outside Parliament: eighty years later, Benn could not even get him onto a postage stamp, at a time when Rosa Luxemburg adorned ordinary West German mail. Such treatment, it might be argued, is not without all justice. For in a comparative perspective, did not the English Civil War – however traumatic at the time – prove in the end to be the least significant of the political upheavals that accompanied the birth of the leading nation-states of the capitalist world? Set beside the Dutch Revolt, America’s War for Independence, the French Revolution, Italy’s Risorgimento, the unification of Germany, let alone the Meiji Restoration in Japan, the overthrow of the English monarchy seems of a different order: not a modern starting point of institutional development, more an exotic intermission. If this is so, however, there remains a paradox. For what would be the most barren convulsion has produced the most fertile literature. The volume of modern writing on the French Revolution – the only possible rival – is larger than on the English. But intellectually it is thinner."

"A born soldier of humble origins, Cromwell's military record in the Civil Wars was second to none. His 'reign' as Lord Protector from 1653 to 1658 has marked him for later generations as either a visionary political figure or a loathsome tyrant, and both cases are equally arguable; his religious bigotry, and the bitter fruit it bore in Ireland, are sadly beyond dispute. He remains secure in his reputation as one of the most extraordnary Englishmen who ever lived."

"The issues raised in the historic conflict between Charles I, resting his claim to govern Britain on the divine right of kings, and Parliament - representing, however imperfectly, a demand for the wider sharing of power - concerned the use and abuse of state power, the right of the governed to a say in their government, and the nature of political freedom. The Levellers grew out of this conflict. They represented the aspirations of working people who suffered under the persecution of kings, landowners and the priestly class, and they spoke for those who experienced the hardships of poverty and deprivation. They developed and campaigned, first with Cromwell and then against him, for a political and constitutional settlement of the civil war which would embody principles of political freedom, anticipating by a century and a half the ideas of the American and French revolutions."

"On 4 January 1642, accompanied by courtiers and royal guards with their swords drawn, the king marched into the House of Commons to arrest Pym and four other parliamentary leaders on a charge of high treason. Commandeering the speaker's chair, his eyes surveying the membership, he called out Pym's name, then Holles's, but there was no response. The five MPs had got wind of their imminent arrest and fled. The king, exasperated, asked the speaker, William Lenthall, where they had gone. He replied with a ringing assertion of parliamentary privilege: "May it please your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as this House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." In the short term, Charles was humiliated, forced to leave in a huff amid shouts of "privilege, privilege!" by his defiant Commons. In the long run, it was clear that there could be no peace, let alone cooperation, between king and parliament. Nor did he feel safe in the Puritan-controlled metropolis. In February he put the queen on a ship bound for the continent and then fled with the court to York."

"By this stage, military action of some kind between king and Parliament was inevitable. That is not to say that either wanted war. Centuries of belief in the Great Chain of Being and monarchy were difficult to break. But now, with rebellion in Scotland and Ireland fueling military solutions in England, no one knew how to make peace. Each side armed itself, either in reaction to the violence abroad or out of fear of violence at home. Each could only view the other's posture of "self-defense" as threatening war. In March, Parliament, fearing a popish plot, passed a Militia Ordinance and, acting on it without royal consent, seized all the garrisons it could and egan t raise troops. In June, the king began to do the same, resorting to raising forces through a Medieval precedent, the Commissions of Disarray. This presented local leaders with a difficult choice- whose order to obey? Finally, on August 22, 1642, King Charles raised the royal standard- tantamount to a declaration of hostilities- at Nottingham. The English Civil War had begun."

"Cromwell's charge at Naseby determined the Civil War. When the grim Ironsides rode down the more splendid cavalry that mustered under the royal standard, they destroyed Charles's last chance of keeping the open field. Thenceforth, all he could do was to move about amongst his strongholds, the reduction of which was the only work that remained to be accomplished by the victorious army of the parliament. One after another, some by storm and some by famine, garrisoned cities, towns, and fortified mansions fell into the hands of Fairfax and Cromwell, and as the year 1645 approached its termination, the parliamentary forces began to hem in the king's last place of retreat, the loyal and beautiful Oxford, the capital of the Cavaliers. The Roundheads were first discerned from the old tower of Oxford Castle, crowning the heights at a distance from the city. They soon approached nearer, commanding every road, and seizing every defensible point; but it was not until Fairfax had cleared the West, and driven the Prince of Wales to Scilly, that he returned northward with the main body of his troops, and prepared to invest Oxford in due form."

"The question then arose- What was the king to do? His friends, even the most sanguine, deemed his cause irretrievably lost. Without money, his supporters ruined by the sacrifices they had already made, his garrisons compelled to plunder as their only means of support, and the country consequently universally disaffected towards the royal cause, it was impossible that the king could carry on the contest any longer. What then was he to do? He had now tried almost all possible courses. He had endeavoured to govern with a parliament, and had failed. He had striven to do so without a parliament: in that also he had failed. Again, he had been induced to call a parliament by which he had been driven into concessions, but they were made grudgingly, in bad faith, and with the clear intention of being resumed as soon as possible: in this course he had also failed. Lastly, he had appealed to the final arbiter of national disputes, and again the result had been adverse to his hopes. His subjects, esteemed the most loyal people in Europe, had met him, front to front, in the open field. His choicest troops, commanded by some of the bravest of the English nobility, had been beaten in many successive engagements, and, finally, had been cut to pieces and utterly destroyed. What now remained for him to do? Peace, upon the best terms that could be obtained, was the ardent longing of every one. The staunchest Cavaliers saw that submission was a bitter but unavoidable necessity. The victorious party must have its way. The cause had been decided in their favor. The losers must submit."

"Such was the feeling and the reasoning of the Cavaliers, but not of the king. Submission was a thing to which Charles could never be brought. It was his candid avowal with respect to his own character, that he could never yield in a good cause; which every man thinks his own cause to be. True, it was no longer possible for him to gain his ends by active measures; but he had not ceased to be a power in the State. If he could not govern, he might prevent his enemies from doing so. The weary and exhausted country could have no peace without him. If those who were opposed to him desired tranquility, they must have it upon his terms. He was beaten, vanquished, ruined, but no earthly power could induce him to sacrifice his royal dignity by yielding the principal points which were in dispute."

"He believed that the machine of government could not act without him; that if he could only keep the public affairs long enough in the condition of dead-lock to which they were reduced, his enemies would be wearied, or would be forced by the people, into yielding to his terms. His mind was as full as ever of the most exalted notions of the sacred and indefeasible character of his royal authority. All who opposed him were, in his estimation, wicked rebel whom God would judge. It was his place to govern, and that of his people to submit. His sins of misgovernment never occurred to him. Regret that for many years his course of action had been totally wanting in the kingly virtues of justice and fair dealing never entered his mind. It never troubled him that he had sought to govern in defiance of his own concessions, in opposition to the even then acknowledged principles of the constitution, and in breach of his coronation oath. The only things which grieved him were his concessions to the popular fury which himself had roused. While such was Charles' state of mind, peace was out of the question. On the side of parliament, it was clearly seen that when a king sets up his standard against his people, he must conquer or submit; and that if, having failed to conquer, he refuses to submit, he must be deposed. To have yielded to him on the ultimate points of the contest, would have been to have relinquished the fruits of the warfare in which parliament had been victorious. What then was to be done? Simply to follow him through a succession of messages and answers, until it became apparent to the people that the country must be governed without him. That was the course for parliament, but what remained for the king? Nothing but to fall back upon his old course of intrigue."

"Without much talent for intrigue, or even much dexterity in its practice, Charles had great fondness for being engaged in it. In all difficulties it was his resource, and at the time with which we are dealing he was fanatically sanguine that some one or other of his little subtle stratagems would ultimately succeed. We are accustomed to associate the notion of fanaticism with the opposite party only. They concluded that the cause of the parliament was righteous and favored by God because it was successful. Every one sees this to have been a dangerous judging of the ways of Providence from partial results. We can all join in condemning conclusions so presumptuous and so illogical. But the same reasoning was equally rife at Oxford as at Westminster. Charles attributed his want of success in the war to God's anger against him for his concurrence in the death of Stafford. He confidently anticipated the approach of a time when he should have drained the cup of vengeance. Mercy would then, he presumed, take the place of justice, and the storm of heavenly wrath, transferred from him, would fall heavily on the heads of his enemies. To help on the ends of Providence, to expedite, as he supposed, the coming of that happy day, and to gain time until it shoud dawn, were the objects of the many intrigues in which he was involved during the year 1646."

"During the Civil War the naval contribution to the parliamentary cause was secondary. The victory was decided on land. The fact that Parliament had control of the navy was nonetheless vital in making victory possible. If the king had retained control of the fleet the royalists could have blockaded London, and the resulting economic dislocation might have generated enough popular pressure to force Parliament into peace on almost any terms. During the war, the Navy's undramatic work in protecting commerce kept up the level of customs revenues and helped finance the war effort. The navy was an effective deterrent to any foreign monarch tempted to send help to Charles. It assisted land campaigns by transporting supplies and reinforcements and by providing mobile artillery. It played an important role in maintaining the outposts at Hull and Plymouth and contributed to the capture of Bristol and Newcastle. The earl of Warwick, as Lord High Admiral, and his vice-admiral and successor William Batten provided vigorous and effective leadership."

"During the interregnum the navy's role was far more spectacular. The rulers of continental Europe were horrified by the execution of the king in January 1649 and all repudiated the new Commonwealth. The navy was thus needed to protect England from possible invasion and to force foreign powers to recognize the new regime. Over the next eleven years, it was almost continuously in action, both defensive and offensive."

"In July 1642 Charles I's splendid navy defected to Parliament without firing a shot. Throughout the First English Civil War, the king thus faced the humiliation of fighting his own 'royal' navy. Far more was at stake, of course, than injured pride. As Clarendon observed, the loss of the fleet was 'of unspeakable ill consequence to the king's affairs', and dealt a devastating blow to his chances of winning the war. While command of the navy could never guarantee victory, without it Parliament would have faced almost certain and rapid defeat."

"Winning control of the navy in 1642 represented a financial as well as military coup for Parliament. It ensured that in the struggle ahead the commercial life of the capital retained some degree of normality and that customs revenues flowed into parliamentary not royal coffers. Had Charles retained control of the fleet and a major port, the course of events would have been very different. He would then have been able to bring in munitions and supplies from the continent without obstruction. More importantly, a blockade of the Thames, cutting off London's food and fuel supplies and strangling its economic life, would have triggered mass demonstrations by the hungry and unemployed, and intense pressure from the merchant community. In all probability, Parliament would have been forced to sue for peace on almost any terms the king cared to offer."

"Inevitably naval operations diverted enormous sums that could have been poured into the war effort on land. But such calculations miss the point, for without maritime trade would have been helpless against the massed privateers, and it is not hard to discern a doomsday scenario. Parliament would have lost a significant part of its income without a stable maritime trade to generate customs revenues. Even more important, the crippling of London's commerce would have brought tens of thousands of hungry and angry citizens onto the streets. In those circumstances, parliamentary leaders would have had little choice but to settle for whatever terms Charles might offer. Much the same applies to the military situation. In the absence of a parliamentary fleet, continental powers would certainly have poured far more arms and ammunition into the royalist war effort. It is quite likely too that Parliament would have lost all control in Ireland, and certain that after the cessation in 1643 many thousand more troops would have crossed the Irish Sea to join the king. They would have placed Charles in a much stronger military position in 1643-4, and it is conceivable that they might have proved decisive before the Scots' intervention in 1644 restored the balance."

"The navy's greatest contribution, then, lay in defining the terms of the land war in Parliament's favor. It sustained Parliament's economic position and revenues while cutting off the king's main lines of supply. As in the two World Wars of the twentieth century, naval preponderance was essential to avoid defeat, and a precondition for the victory that only land forces could deliver. Modern civil war historians have tended to marginalize the navy's contribution. Perhaps one should reflect on the fact that the parliamentary leaders, however desperate for cash, were never attracted by the option of keeping the navy in the harbor to save money. They recognized that it would be a false and perhaps fatal economy."

"The parliamentary navy had played a significant, if secondary, part in the civil wars; the civil wars played a still more significant part in the navy's history, accelerating its evolution and fitting it for the primary role it was to play in the imperial ages ahead."

"Princes are not bound to give an account of their actions but to God alone."

"Thus goaded, Charles, accompanied by three or four hundred swordsmen- "Cavaliers" we may now call them- went down to the House of Commons. It was January 4, 1642. Never before had a king set foot in the Chamber. When his officers knocked at the door and it was known that he had come in person members of all parties looked upon each other in amazement. His followers beset the doors. All rose at his entry. The Speaker, William Lenthall, quitted his chair and knelt before him. The King, seating himself in the chair, after professing his goodwill to the House, demanded the surrender of indicted Members- Pym, Hampden, Holles, Hazelrigg, and Strode. But a treacherous message from a lady of the Queen's Bedchamber had given Pym a timely warning. The accused Members had already embarked at Westminster steps and were safe amid the train bands and magistrates of the City. Speaker Lenthall could give no information. "I have only eyes to see and ears to hear as the House may direct," he pleaded. The King, already conscious of his mistake, cast his eyes around the quivering assembly. "I see that the birds are flown," he said lamely, and after some civil reassurances, he departed at the head of his disappointed, growling adherents. But as he left the Chamber a low, long murmur of "Privilege" pursued him. To this day the Members for the City take their places on the Treasury bench at the opening of a session, in perpetual acknowledgment of the services rendered by the City in protecting the Five."

"Upon this episode the wrath of London became uncontrollable. The infuriated mobs who thronged the streets and bellowed outside the palace caused Charles and his Court to escape from the capital to Hampton Court. He never saw London again except to suffer trial and death. Within a week of his intrusion into the House the five Members were escorted back to Parliament from the City. Their progress was triumphal. Over two thousand armed men accompanied them up the river, and on either bank large forces, each with eight pieces of cannon, marched abreast of the flotilla. Henceforth London was irretrievably lost to the King. By stages, he withdrew to Newmarket, to Nottingham, and to York. Here he waited during the early months of 1642, while the tireless antagonisms which rent England slowly built him an authority and an armed force. There were now two centers of government. Pym, the Puritans, and what was left of the Parliament ruled with dictatorial power in London in the King's name. The King, around whom there gathered many of the finest elements in Old England, freed from the bullying of the London mob, became once again a prince with sovereign rights. About the two centers there slowly assembled the troops and resources for the waging of civil war."

"The King's large plan for 1643 had failed. Nevertheless, the campaign had been very favorable to him. He had gained control of a great part of England. His troops were still, on the whole, better fighting men than the Roundheads. Much ground lost at the beginning of the war had been recovered. A drift of desertion to the royal camp had begun. All could see how even were the forces which rent the kingdom. On both sides, men's thoughts turned to peace. Not so the thoughts of Pym; he looked to the Scots; by substantial money payments he induced a Scots army of not less than eleven thousand men to intervene. He led Parliament on September 25 into signing a Solemn League and Covenant among themselves and with the Scots to wage war with untiring zeal. It was a military alliance expressed in terms of a religious manifesto. Then on December 8 Pym died, uncheered by success, but wearied by misfortune. He had neglected his private affairs in the public cause, and his estate would have been bankrupt had not Parliament, as some expression of their grief and gratitude, paid his debts. He remains the most famous of the old Parliamentarians and the man who more than any other saved England from absolute monarchy and set her on the path she has since pursued."

"Marston Moor was the largest and also the bloodiest battle of the war. Little quarter was given and there were four thousand slain. Newcastle's "white-coats" fought to the death, and fell where they stood. They had boasted that they would dye these white coats with the blood of the foe. They were indeed reddened, but with their own blood. Night alone ended the pursuit. A disaster of the first magnitude had smitten the King's cause. His Northern army was shattered and the whole of the North was lost. The prestige of Rupert's cavalry was broken. The Marquis, brokenhearted, fled into exile. Rupert, whom nothing could appal, gathered up the remnants of his army and led them safely south to Shrewsbury."

"Cromwell rode in from the Army to his duties as a Member of Parliament. His differences with the Scots and his opposition to Presbyterian uniformity were already swaying Roundhead politics. He now made a vehement and organised attack on the conduct of the war, and its mismanagement by lukewarm generals of noble rank, namely Essex and Manchester. Essex was discredited enough after Lostwithiel, but Cromwell also charged Manchester with losing the second Battle of Newbury by sloth and want of zeal. He himself was avid for the power and command which he was sure he could wield; but he proceeded astutely. While he urged the complete reconstitution of the Parliamentarian Army upon a New Model similar to his own in the Eastern Counties, his friends in the House of Commons proposed a so-called "Self-Denying Ordinance," which would exclude members of either House from military employment. The handful of lords who still remained at Westminster realised well enough that this was an attack on their prominence in the conduct of the war, if not on their social order. But there were such compelling military reasons in favour of the measure that neither they nor the Scots, who already dreaded Cromwell, could prevent its being carried. Essex and Manchester, who had fought the king from the beginning of the quarrel, who had raised regiments and served the Parliamentary cause in all fidelity, were discarded. They pass altogether from the story."

"During the winter months the Army was reconstituted in accordance with Cromwell's ideas. The old personally raised regiments of the Parliamentary nobles were broken up ad their officers and men incorporated in entirely new formations. These, the New Model, comprised eleven regiments of horse, each six hundred strong, twelve regiments of foot, twenty-two hundred strong, and a thousand dragoons, in all twenty-two thousand men. Compulsion was freely used to fill the ranks. In one district of Sussex the three conscriptions of April, July, and September 1645 yielded a total of 149 men. A hundred and thirty-four guards were needed to escort them to the colours. At the King's headquarters it was thought that these measures would demoralise the Parliamentary troops; and no doubt at first this was so. But the Roundhead faction now had a symmetrical military organisation led by men who had risen in the field and had no other standing but their military record and religious zeal. Sir Thomas Fairfax was appointed Command-in-Chief. Cromwell, as Member for Cambridge, was at first debarred from serving. However, it soon appeared that his Self-denying Ordinance applied only to his rivals. The urgency of the new campaign and military discontents which he alone could quell forced even the reluctant Lords to make an exception in his favour. In June 1645 he was appointed General of the Horse, and was thus the only man who combined high military command with an outstanding Parliamentary position. From this moment he became the dominant figure in both spheres."

"The Story of the Second English Civil War is short and simple. King, Lords and Commons, landlords, merchants, the City and the countryside, bishops and presbyters, the Scottish army, the Welsh people, and the English Fleet, all now turned against the New Model Army. The Army beat the lot."

"By the end of 1648 it was all over. Cromwell was Dictator. The Royalists were crushed; Parliament was a tool; the Constitution was a figment; the Scots were rebuffed, the Welsh back in their mountains; the Fleet was reorganized, London overawed. King Charles, at Carisbrooke Castle, where the donkey treads the water wheel, was left to pay the bill. It was mortal."

"We must not be led by Victorian writers into regarding this triumph of the Ironsides and of Cromwell as a kind of victory for democracy and the Parliamentary system over Divine Right and Old World dreams. It was the triumph of some twenty thousand resolute, ruthless, disciplined, military fanatics over all that England has ever willed or wished. Long years and unceasing irritations were required to reverse it. Thus the struggle, in which we have in these days so much sympathy and part, begun to bring about a constitutional and limited monarchy, had led only to the autocracy of the sword. The harsh, erratic, lightning-charged being, whose erratic, opportunist, self-centred course is laid bare upon the annals, was now master, and the next twelve years are the record of his well-meant, puzzling plungings and surgings."

"County studies have succeeded in proving that there was no self-sufficient impetus to rebellion (let alone revolution) within the English counties. The English Civil War, we can then see, was the result of a "domino effect" produced by successful rebellions in Scotland and Ireland."

"Final evidence of the extent to which an identity of interest was assumed between the court and Catholicism can be seen in a common reaction to the Irish rebellion. Edward Hyde, Edmund Ludlow and Robert Baillie each, and from very different standpoints, recorded the country's immediate conviction that the Queen certainly, and the King possibly, had encouraged the massacre. Such suspicions made trust between the King and his subjects impossible and without trust no compromise in the constitutional crisis was feasible... the "popish plot" panics between 1640 and 1642 heightened the general sense of crisis, making large numbers of the common population feel personally threatened and in danger. Even where it did not directly affect the course of events anti-Catholicism increased tension, creating suspicion and fear, and so helped drive the situation on to conflict. For many contemporary writers the essence of the conflict was in fact a collision between true religion and popery: here, for them, was the reality underlying disagreement between King and Parliament."

"I tell you we will cut off his head with the crown upon it."

"Cruel necessity."

"I had rather have a plain, russet-coated Captain, that knows what he fights for, and loves what he knows, than that you call a Gentleman and is nothing else."

"A few honest men are better than numbers."

"God made them as stubble to our swords."

"This is a righteous judgement of God upon these barbarous wretches, who have imbrued their hands in so much innocent blood."

"You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!"

"What really weakened the royalist war-effort was the fact that the conflict had a greater impact on its territories than on those of Parliament and thus the financial machinery could not be managed properly. In particular, the war impinged closely on some of its most prosperous areas, creating a general sense of insecurity there and affecting the amount of revenue received. This, in turn, necessitated the introduction of various expedients to obtain money and essential supplies, including special levies, free quarter, and requisitioning. As final defeat stared them in the face, royalist units engaged in ever more self-destructive activity just to keep themselves alive. They started a vicious circle by robbing their own shires. Looting engendered hatred from civilians; it also rendered the countryside incapable of paying the tax upon which the soldiers' pay depended; this in turn drove the soldiers to more frantic looting. As long as the royalists had an army it could be used to coerce the population but the catastrophe of Naseby in June 1645 took away even this."

"A quick victory offered Charles the best chance of winning the war. In the autumn of 1642 he had an opportunity to do so but failed for reasons that were not primarily due to deficiencies in supply. There certainly were shortcomings in this area but Parliament had its own problems too. The longer the war went on, the more likely it became that Parliament, with its commercial and economic superiority, would win. The royalists did make good use of the facilities at their disposal and focused their efforts on the production of war matériel. They exploited their natural resources, developed existing industries, and founded new ones where necessary. However, their workshops, mills, and furnaces could not produce enough goods to meet the demands of their armies, forcing the king to reply increasingly upon imports."

"Before Charles I's experiment in the 1630s, war was not so much inevitable as totally improbable; and the failure of Charles's government was not rendered "inevitable" by deep divisions in society or inherited stresses in the constitution, but was conditioned by the inability of the king and his ministers to operate any political system."

"The history of England between 1603 and 1640 is not the history of a growing disease in the body politic, but of conflict – some of it healthy, some morbid – within a setting of agreed essentials: or rather it was this until the impatient attempt at a drastic solution on the king's behalf persuaded his opponents that the essentials were no longer agreed. Thus the prehistory of the civil war should certainly be read as the breakdown of a system of government. But it did not break down because it had been unworkable from the first... It broke down because the early Stuart governments could not manage or persuade, because they were incompetent, sometimes corrupt, and frequently just ignorant of what was going on or needed doing."

"We need to see the sixteenth-century in terms of its own experience, not as the prehistory of a later revolution. We need to regard even the reigns of the early Stuarts without the conviction that the only thing of moment in their history is the ultimate breakdown of government which we know was to come. If thereafter we want to investigate the causes of the civil war, we need to remember that no revolution of the size claimed for this one ever so readily stopped short and reversed itself."

"If we are to get further, we need at this present no essays on the causes of the civil war, but studies of the political behaviour of all sorts of men in all sorts of institutions, unaffected by the historian's foreknowledge of the later event. In that way we may ultimately perhaps arrive at an explanation of the mid-seventeenth-century breakdown, but it will be less well tailored, less readily reduced to a list of preconditions, precipitants and triggers, less satisfactory to theorists of revolution. On the other hand, it might be real."

"By 1628 Charles and Laud had destroyed the religious unity of England, which many gentry saw as the foundation of monarchy, liberty and law. The eventual outcome of the division created by the promotion of Arminianism in the 1620s was the division Pym created in 1641 by his attempt to use parliament as an instrument to ward off popish conspiracy. In this sense religious issues provided the fundamental cause of the civil war."

"The national debate about the Church was crucial to the process by which the political nation was becoming divided, the process which brought the emergence of two parties at Westminster and made civil war a possibility. This debate mattered so deeply to so many people that there was no question of its being halted."

"The heart of the parliamentarian ideology was the connection in men's minds between the struggle against popery and the preservation of true religion... We can only understand the zeal of the parliamentarians at the start of the war if we appreciate the frustration many of them felt at the bizarre appearance of a Church half reformed, the inspiration afforded by the vision of a new Jerusalem and the shock created by the king's assault in the previous decade on the mainstream of moderate Puritan evangelicalism... What was really at stake at the deepest level of this crisis was not the issue of the militia or appointment of councillors, the immediate expressions of political distrust, but the future of the Church."

"The Puritan core of the parliamentary party could not abandon their belief in the supremacy of truth and that belief had become incompatible with the Foxeian tradition of obedience to the godly prince. Thus anti-Catholicism was turned against the court and even the monarch and the force of it carried men into rebellion. It was the king therefore who had opened the way for the call to apocalyptic warfare that thundered from the London pulpits in 1642 and who had forced a section of the gentry into an unnatural alliance with radical Puritans from further down the social scale."

"There is a real sense in which the English civil war was a war of religion."

"In the wreck of the royal cause we may pause for a moment which brings out in relief the best temper of both sides. Cromwell, who was sweeping over the Southern counties to trample out the last trace of resistance, "spent much time with God in prayer before the storm" of Basing House, where the Marquis of Winchester had held stoutly out through the war for the king. The storm ended its resistance, and the brave old Royalist was brought in a prisoner with his house flaming around him. He "broke out," reports a Puritan bystander, and said, 'that if the King had no more ground in England but Basing House, he would adveture it as he did, and so maintain it to the uttermost,' comforting himself in this matter 'that Basing House was called Loyalty.'" Of such loyalty as this Charles was utterly unworthy. The seizure of his papers at Naseby had hardly disclosed his earlier intrigues with the Irish Catholics when the Parliament was able to reveal to England a fresh treaty with them, which purchased o longer their neutrality, but their aid, by the simple concession of every demand they had made. The shame was without profit, for whatever aid Ireland might have given came too late to be of service. The spring of 1646 saw the few troops who still clung to Charles surrounded and routed at Stow. "You have done your work now," their leader, Sir Jacob Astley, said bitterly to his conquerors, "and may go to play, unless you fall out among yourselves.""

"With the close of the Civil War we enter on a time of confused struggles, a time tedious and uninteresting in its outer details, but of higher interest than even the war itself in its bearing on our history. Modern England, the England among whose thoughts and sentiments we actually live, began, however dimly and darkly, with the triumph at Naseby. Old things passed silently away. When Astley gave up his sword the "work" of the generations which had struggled for Protestantism against Catholicism, for public liberty against absolute rule, in his own emphatic phrase, was "done." So far as these contests were concerned, however the later Stuarts might strive to revive them, England could safely "go to play." English religion was never to be more in danger. English liberty was never to be really in peril from the efforts of kings after a personal rule. Whatever reaction might come about, it would never bring into question the great constitutional results that the Long Parliament had wrought. But with the end of this older work a new work began. The constitutional and ecclesiastical problems which still in one shape or another beset us started to the front as subjects of national debate in the years between the close of the Civil War and the death of the King. The great parties which have ever since divided the social, the political, and the religious life of England, whether as Independents and Presbyterians, as Whigs and Tores, as Conservatives and Liberals, sprang into organized existence in the contest between the Army and the Parliament. Then for the first time began a struggle which is far from having ended yet, the struggle between political tradition and political progress, between the principle of religious conformity and the principle of religious freedom."

"The vexed question of the effectiveness of artillery in the Civil War is not a simple matter to answer. The utility of guns during a siege was indisputable but the effectiveness of artillery depended as much on the skills of the gunners and the placing of the guns as it did on the reluctance of the target units to endure their fire. The ability to use guns in new ways was only in part understood in the Civil War and thereafter the use of artillery changed very little at least until the Napoleonic Wars. The Duke of Cumberland could be seen aligning his guns between his units in the front line at the Battle of Culloden. Incremental changes in the use and preparation of artillery can be seen, but not until the latter half of the 18th century did its use become much more mobile. Although there had been refinements in the use and production of artillery, the gun barrels that were used in the Crimean War were still smooth bore muzzle-loading guns that would not have appeared alien to the members of the artillery train of the 1640s and 50s."

"Historians are in general agreement that Charles I was a lamentable failure as a monarch and by 1640 he had alienated most of his subjects. While far from being a stupid man, Charles was temperamentally authoritarian, holding to an exalted notion of the nature of kingship as God-given and denying opposition any legitimacy. Cold and aloof, he lacked basic political skills and judgment and came increasingly to be seen as untrustworthy. He made concessions with the greatest of reluctance, and sought to reverse them later, and gained a well-deserved reputation for deviousness by negotiating with opponents while, at the same time, planning to use force against them. He pursued unpopular policies, none more so than his disastrous religious policy, and he was personally responsible for the decision to impose the Scottish prayer book which set the whole chain of events that would eventually lead to civil war in motion. Yet the entire responsibility for the conflict cannot be laid at Charles' door even though he had an important part to play in making it possible."

"There would have been no civil war without the creation of a party around the king and it is allegiance to the royalist party that first requires explanation. The royalist party was not principally composed of defenders of arbitrary royal government and long-established ministers and servants of the crown. Crucial to the formation of a viable party was the support of political moderates, such as Culpeper, Hyde and Falkland, who revered the ancient constitution and defended the rue of law with as much enthusiasm as their parliamentarian counterparts. They had been among the principal critics of the abuses of the personal rule and the ministers responsible, and had supported the Long Parliament's initial reform programme. They believed in regular parliaments, taxation by consent and the abolition of prerogative courts. They were consistently maintaining their commitment to the rule of law when they later opposed parliament's innovatory measures, especially legislation by ordinance without the king's consent."

"How far social and economic factors shaped party allegiance is a much more contentious question which revisionist historians tend to treat dismissively. It is true that there has been no convincing class-conflict analysis of the rival parties. Peers, gentry, merchants and the middle and lower ranks of society can be found in significant numbers, and with equivalent degrees of commitment, on both sides. However, local studies have concluded that, away from the south-east and eastern England, a much higher proportion of the landowning elite of peers and gentry became royalists than parliamentarians. In London too the fertile ranks of the wealthy and traditionally powerful were especially powerful territory for royalism, although the party also had definite popular roots as well, and the same pattern may obtain in other cities and large towns."

"An attempt to relate party allegiance to agricultural regions (with royalism the pattern in settled arable regions and parliamentarianism in wood-pasture areas) has only been partially successful, with the obvious objection that the royalism of northern England and Wales fails to conform to this model. There is much more force in the argument that a 'moral panic' triggered by the fear of popular unrest and disorder, and a growing belief that traditional authority and privilege were being undermined, led large numbers of the elite to rally to the king as a symbol of order and orthodoxy. A marked increase in the number of agrarian riots in the early 1640s, large-scale demonstrations in the capital and popular pressures on parliament, disturbances in churches as Laudian innovations were reversed, attacks on well-born papists and malignants by their social inferiors, subversive pamphlets and sermons as censorship collapsed, and the activities of sectaries all combined to convince some royalists, understandably but mistakenly, that their world was about to be turned upside-down."

"Most parliamentarians in 1642 were not supporters of a party that was intent on wresting power from the king and vesting it in parliament. They still hoped for an eventual political settlement that would retain all the essential features of the ancient constitution, including a critical role for the monarchy. As yet no principled defense of resistance to a monarch who would not agree to such a settlement had been developed. Parliamentarians prepared to fight their king hiding behind the fiction that they were engaged in self-defence against royalist aggression (for whic 'evil counselors' rather than the king himself were responsible) or, in the doctrine of the king's two bodies, that they were upholding the authority of the king while fighting against his person."

"[T]he Question in dispute between the King's Party and us being, as I apprehended, Whether the King should govern as a God by his Will, and the Nation be governed by Force like Beasts: or whether the People should be governed by Laws made by themselves, and live under a Government derived from their own Consent."

"In the early part of 1642 only two small minorities saw a resort to force as either necessary or inevitable. There were a few wholehearted royalists who for some time had been telling the king that if he did not show a willingness to defend his rights by force he would never be able to stop the steady erosion of his power; and there were a few radical puritans who were ready to resort to force to bring about sweeping changes in the government and doctrine of the church. But the vast majority of the two Houses of Parliament, of the nobility and gentry in general, of the government officers, of the lawyers, of the mayors and aldermen of the towns, of the leading merchants, in other words, the great bulk of the governing classes, still deplored the thought of resolving the disagreement by force, and still hoped for and expected agreement between the king, Lords and Commons."

"Yet they were steadily being divided into two parties during 1642; parliamentarians, who distrusted the king and demanded more restrictions on his power, at least for a time until they could trust him with greater power again; and royalists, who were unhappy about reducing the power of the crown too much, and longed to be able to trust the king. This was not a division over religious or political ends. Thus men from the same social background and with the same economic interests, with similar political and religious ideas, found themselves in opposite parties, for the decision they had to take in 1642 was not a decision about the best form of government for the church or for the state, nor about the changes in the social or the economic order, but simply whether or not to trust Charles I."

"Many of those who distrusted the king and regarded his obstinacy as the only obstacle to agreement consented to the raising of an army under the command of the Earl of Essex because they thought that a show of force would make the king more reasonable. They believed that no more than a show of force would be necessary because the king appeared to have few supporters and small means to raise an army; he would not be able to fight and would be obliged to negotiate. But the king proved to have more supporters and greater resources than at first appeared. For many were willing to trust him now that he seemed almost powerless. They did not wish to see him forced into an abject surrender which would permanently weaken the crown. They supported him because they thought that when parliament saw that he had the means to fight it would moderate its demands and reach an agreement without bloodshed. So by the end of summer 1642 there were two armies on foot in England, and the country found that it had drifted into a civil war that few wanted to fight."

"Distrust was the main obstacle to agreement between king and parliament, but it might not have been an insurmountable obstacle without the conjuncture of other factors, which involved the lower classes in the crisis and drove a deeper wedge into the ruling class. These other factors were the fear of papists, the sharp decline of trade and industry, and an upsurge of class-feeling and class-hostility."

"This diplomatic revolution, part of the growing bureaucratization of government, was complemented by a revolution in political ideas that we can measure in the changing use of the term “state.” In the fourteenth century the Latin term status (and vernacular equivalents such as estat or state) was mainly used with reference to the standing of rulers themselves, much as we would today use the term “status.” Thus the chronicler Jean Froissart, describing King Edward III entertaining foreign dignitaries in 1327, recorded that his queen “was to be seen there in an estat of great nobility.” Gradually, however, usage was extended to include the institutions of government. In the works of Machiavelli, written in the 1510s, lo stato becomes an independent agent, separate from those who happen to be its rulers. In a similar vein, Thomas Starkey, the English political commentator of the 1530s, claimed that the “office and duty” of rulers was to “maintain the state established in the country” over which they ruled. The thrust of such arguments was to limit the power of kings by postulating their higher obligation to the common good. In radical hands this implied that subjects had the right to overthrow tyrannical rulers, which is what happened in the English civil wars of the 1640s and Europe’s bitter wars of religion. Responding to this crisis of governance,Thomas Hobbes moved the debate to a different level, defining the state as “an artificial man” abstractly encapsulating the whole populace, who enjoys absolute sovereignty (his “artificial soul . . . giving life and motion to the body”) which is exercised in practice through a sovereign ruler. This gradual but dramatic word shift, from the medieval state of princes to the person of the Hobbesian state, was hugely important for political thought. It also reinforced the decline of dynastic summitry: diplomacy, like governance, was no longer regarded as the sole prerogative of princes."

"In 1603 King James VI of Scotland succeeded the childless Queen Elizabeth I on the throne of England as James I. Thereafter, although frequently professing an intimate attachment to their ancient kingdom, both he and his son King Charles I, who succeeded him in 1625, regarded themselves first and foremost as English monarchs. Scotland nevertheless still retained its own parliament, referred to as the Estates, and therefore its own quite separate system of government. Unfortunately, moves initiated by Charles I in 1633 with the aim of bringing both the Scottish church and legal system into line with English practice proved to be a disastrous mistake. In 17th century Britain religion and politics were still inextricably linked, and the monarchy's temporal and religious prerogatives were both the subject of passionate debate among the influential classes. Less than a century beforehand the struggle between Roman Catholic and Protestant had seen religious martyrs burned alive at the stake; and despite Elizabeth's generally successful establishment of the Anglican Protestant church of England created by her father Henry VIII, both her reign and that of James I were intermittently troubled by Roman Catholic conspiracies."

"In England a strong dissenting or low-church movement (the Puritans) was hostile to what it saw as Charles' ambiguity towards Catholicism (his queen was a French Catholic), and suspicions of his rumored future plans for meddling with the Protestant settlement. Simultaneously, on the political front, resentment was growing in both England and Scotland towards the King's autocratic style of rule, which tended to unite very diverse groups in at least temporary opposition to Charles, whatever their fundamental views of the monarchy itself. On his part, Charles was continually frustrated by the grudging and conditional grants of funds controlled by the English Parliament which was increasingly conscious of its own constitutional powers, and of which some influential members were leaders of the Puritan religious movement."

"In the summer of 1642 the First Civil War between King and Parliament had broken out in England. Initially both sides were confident of victory, but after the first campaigns ended in stalemate they began looking for allies. The Scots government was willing to assist the English Parliamentarians, and even before a formal treaty was signed the raising of troops got underway."

"It is fairly easy to conjure up in the imagination a picture of the New Model Army as a Bible-reading, Psalm-singing soldiery which forsook shops and fields for pikes and muskets in support of the Parliamentary cause. Such intimations of piety are born out to some extent in the writings of the chaplains of the New Model. Indeed, for Cromwell and the Army chaplains the Civil War was primarily a religious struggle. "Religion was not the thing at first contested for," said Cromwell, "but God brought it to that issue at last; and gave it unto us by redundancy, and at last it proved that which was most dear to us." Not only were the issues religious ones, but from the point of view of the chaplains the soldiers were religious also."

"Despite these views it is doubtful that the rank and file of the New Model Army were as deeply imbued with religious ideas as the chaplains contended. Two cogent arguments to this effect may be cited: the use of impressment in addition to voluntary enlistment, and the plundering of churches. The second argument is not unanswerable; the desecration of churches as was actually defended by chaplain Robert Ram as being essentially an expression of intolerance toward Anglicanism- i.e., toward superstition and idolatry- growing out of an ardent desire for more simplified ecclesiastical forms. The impressment argument is much stronger. Five Parliamentary ordinances from February to June, 1645, dealt with the impressment of men for the Parliamentary forces. On 12 May the Venetian ambassador commented that the violence and force used by Parliament to compel men to serve in the Army was "cooling off" the favor of the common people. Peters, while making no claims for their religiosity, noted how serviceable the worst of the impressed men had been under the example of the other soldiers. General Fairfax observed that good soldiers had come out of the King's Army after the surrender of the Royalist garrisons. Good impressed soldiers, although not by definition irreligious, could hardly have been inspired by the same religious zeal, at least to begin with, which had prompted others to volunteer."

"Most of the Army preachers believed that the New Model was an army of saints who were possessed by the Holy Spirit and were thus assured of their own salvation- to the point of believing that they were victorious in battle because God had been in the midst of them. "If God be for us," ran the text from Romans 8:31, "who can be against us?""

"William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle (1592-1676) commanded the Royalists in northern England, and during 1643 made heavy work of defeating a small parliamentarian army. In 1644 he faced the invading Scots, and his tardiness in joining Prince Rupert before Marston Moor may have cost the Royalists victory. After the battle he fled to the Continent, where he wrote a book on horsemanship which remains his chief claim to fame."

"Prince Rupert was more than an inspiring leader; despite his youth he had wide experience of continental warfare, and was a keen student of military theory. His daring and skill gave victory to the Royalist horse in most of the early battles of the Civil Wars."

"When a civil war began in the 1640s between the King's forces and the Parliamentary forces, many English religious dissenters joined the anti-royalists. At this time, Virginia's royal governor, William Berkeley, reacted by arbitrarily condemning all Virginia dissenters as similar being seditious anti-royalists; some Tidewater dissenters were banished from Virginia at this time, while others simply moved farther up the James River to areas (in present-day Hanover County) north and west of its fall-line. Some of these "uprooted and transplanted" Piedmont dissenters became the ancestors of the Presbyterian congregation that would later be formed at Hampden-Sydney, Virginia."

"Both of the colony's principal dissenters- the English Puritans and the Scots-Irish- proudly considered themselves to be ecclesiastical rebels after the fashion of John Calvin (ca. 1514-1571), and patriotic rebels after the fashion of two of England's celebrated 17th century martyr heroes: (1) the politician-soldier John Hampden (1594-1643), who had challenged both the King's arbitrary taxes and his bullying army, and (2) the political philosopher Algernon Sydney (1622-1683), who had challenged in books and speeches the King's self-proclaimed "divine right" in his every declaration. Hampden, a cousin of Oliver Cromwell, had been killed in an opening battle of England's mid-century civil war, and Sydney had been executed after the Crown had returned to power following eleven years of Oliver Cromwell's [blessedly-short] Puritan rule of grim and cheerless peace."

"You have satisfaction in your conscience that you are in the right; that the king ought not to grant what is required of him; and so you do your duty and your business together: but for my part, I do not like the quarrel, and do heartily wish that the king would yield and consent to what they desire; so that my conscience is only concerned in honour and in gratitude to follow my master. I have eaten his bread, and served him near thirty years, and will not do so base a thing as to forsake him; and choose rather to lose my life (which I am sure I shall do) to preserve and defend those things which are against my conscience to preserve and defend: for I will deal freely with you, I have no reverence for the bishops, for whom this quarrel subsists."

"It is strange to note how we have insensibly slid into this beginning of a civil war by one unexpected accident after another, as waves of the sea, which have brought us thus far; and we scarce know how, but from paper combats, by declarations, remonstrances, protestations, votes, messages, answers, and replies, we are now come to the question of raising forces, and naming a general and officers of an army... The sum of the progress of civil war is the rage of fire and sword, and (which is worse) of brutish men. What the issue of it will be, no man alive can tell, probably few of us now here may live to see the end of it."

"I wish the observation of the duke de Rohan in his interest of Christendom may prove a caution, not a prophecy. He saith of England, that it is a great creature, which cannot be destroyed but by its own hand. And there is not a more likely hand than that of civil war to do it. The issue of all war is like a cast at dice, none can tell upon what square the alea belli will light. The best issue that can be expected of a civil war, ubi victor flet, et victus perit: which of these will be our portion is uncertain, and the choice should be avoided. Yet, sir, when I have said this, I am not for a tame resignation of our religion, lives, and liberties into the hands of our adversaries, who seek to devour us. Nor do I think it inconsistent with your great wisdom, to prepare for a just and necessary defence of them."

"The rate of cannon-fire was very slow. The process of sponging-out and reloading was deliberate and complex. Powder was kept in small budge barrels near the guns, which were fired by the application of linstock to the touch-hole. The risk of premature explosions was very great, and it is doubtful whether it was possible to fire more than one round every three minutes. By the time of Waterloo it was possible, using grapeshot, to get off as many as three rounds a minute for short periods. With grape-shot the recoil was reduced and it was not necessary to run the guns up between rounds. But by 1815 all sorts of improvements had been made, with guns lightened and means of traction improved."

"The musket in common use was a heavy matchlock, which even a trained soldier could not hope to fire more than once a minute. Though it might kill or main at 200 yards it was not likely to hit the target at a range of more than 50 yards. The reason for this inaccuracy was that the bullet did not fit the smooth-bore barrel at all tightly, and therefore, when propelled towards the target, it tended to wander. The disadvantages of match were all too obvious: by night it could betray the position of the musketeers, and in foul weather it simply went out."

"One comes across another form of musket during this period: an early flintlock known as the 'snaphance' or 'firelock.' It was comparatively rare, and soldiers so armed were usually employed to guard the train of artillery. There was less chance of unfortunate accidents if its escort consisted of men armed with flintlocks rather than with matchlocks."

"Sir Thomas Fairfax, later Third Baron Fairfax of Cameron (1612-71), served at the siege of Bois-le-Duc (1629) and in the First Scots War. From 1642 to 1646 he was the life and soul of his father's small force which kept up the unequal struggle with Newcastle's Northern Army until it was destroyed at Marston Moor. His tactical skill and gallant leadership as well as his victories at Wakefield (21 May 1643), and Nantwich (25 January 1644) led to his selection as commander of the New Model Army, whose victories at Naseby, Langport, Torrington and elsewhere put an end to the First Civil War. Fairfax, a taciturn man, was no politician, and power gradually passed to his second-in-command, Oliver Cromwell. His wife's sympathies were Royalist and he played no part in the trial of Charles I."

"Artillery had proved its worth in battles as well as in sieges as early as the middle of the fifteenth century; it was decisive at Castillon as at Constantinople. But its progress had been slow, and, at the time of the civil wars, many of its characteristics were still unsatisfactory. Ranges were short, rates of fire slow, equipment heavy and means of traction uneconomical. Nevertheless, both round-shot and case-shot were damaging missiles, which could score heavily on a troop of horse or a stand of pikes, whilst for siege work the big guns were invaluable."

"England in August 1642 was in the midst of harvest, the fields covered in shocks of corn or standing golden brown ready for the sickle. But the time had come for another and bitter harvest. The long months of move and counter move between King Charles and his Parliament were over, culminating with the monarch's leading armed men into the House of Commons to arrest five members, only to find his birds flown. Now, with the raising of the royal standard at Nottingham on 22 August, the country lay under the shadow of fratricidal Civil War."

"As nations, we've known hardship and division, but we've also found solace and sympathy in one another. And just 4 years before we issued our Declaration of Independence, Benjamin Franklin came to the Irish Parliament and declared—and described it as, I quote, "disposed to be friends of America." End of quote. In turn, the next Ireland—in turn, the text of Ireland's 1916 Proclamation displayed mainly in the main foyer of this building draws on the support of Ireland's "exiled children in America." The quote. Draws on the support of "exiled children in America." We're nations that know what it means to persevere for freedom, to brave a civil war, to toil in the vineyards of democracy. And that's, again, not hyperbole; it's a fact. It's a fact. It's not just the hope, but the conviction that better days lie ahead, that brought us along. We have the power to build a better future."

"We beat them in the cities and we whipped them in the streets. And the world hailed Michael Collins, our commander and chief. And they sent you off to London to negotiate a deal And to gain us a Republic, united, boys, and real. But the women and the drink, Mick, they must have got to you, 'Cause you came back with a country divided up in two."

"We had to turn against you, Mick, there was nothing we could do 'Cause we couldn't betray the Republic like Arthur Griffith and you. We fought against each other, two brothers steeped in blood, But I never doubted that your heart was broken in the flood. And though we had to shoot you down in golden Béal na mBláth, I always knew that Ireland lost her greatest son of all."

"Fairly restrained by international standards, the Irish Civil War was nonetheless an intense and often cruel war; there is evidence that victims and perpetrators knew each other, and the community's complicity in violence was central to the success of the killing or forcible displacement of the target."

"There is no British Government anymore in Ireland. It is gone. It is no longer the enemy. We have now a native government, constitutionally elected, and it is the duty of every Irish man and woman to obey it. Anyone who fails to obey is an enemy of the people and must expect to be treated as such. We have to learn that attitudes and actions which were justifiable when directed against alien administration, holding its position by force, are wholly unjustifiable against a native government which exists only to carry out the people's will, and can be changed the moment it ceases to do so. We have to learn that freedom imposes responsibilities."

"The Treaty is already vindicating itself. The English Die-hards said to Mr. Lloyd George and his Cabinet: "You have surrendered". Our own Die-hards said to us: "You have surrendered". There is a simple test. Those who are left in possession of the battlefield have won."

"After the executions, the families of the dead men were sent a typed pro forma notification. The note for the Cassidy family read as follows: 'I am to inform you that Peter Cassidy was tried by a military court on 8 November 1922. That he was found guilty of possession of a firearm without lawful authority and that he was sentenced to death. This sentence was executed on the morning of 17th November 1922. This practice was challenged in the Dáil but continued throughout the civil war and it became common for parents to learn that their son had been executed through a press release or a typed memo shoved through the letterbox. In Dublin, the public and the Dáil learned of the first executions in the afternoon papers. Later that day there was an emergency debate in the Dáil and the decision to execute was hotly challenged by the Labour opposition and other deputies. Mulcahy justified what was done by what he called the need ti 'stem the tide' of lawlessness. 'These men,' he told the Dáil, 'were found on the streets of Dublin at night carrying revolvers and waiting to take the lives of other men.' They had certainly been tried and convicted of possessing loaded revolvers. It is a reasonable inference that they were not charged with the attack on Oriel House because it could not be proved against them. To be tried for one reason and executed for another would become a common scenario during the war."

"The country moved towards the end of 1923: impoverished and riven with bitterness. Control was maintained through censorship and special powers of arrest and internment of those thought to be a danger to the newly established order. The state was still just about in charge of the army but now in the pocket of the Catholic Church hierarchy. It was still not a nation that cherished all its citizens equally and would not be so for very many decades to come."

"One of the most contentious policies was the suspended death sentence experiment tried out in Kerry and then apparently abandoned. Very quickly it became clear that the emerging policy was to amass a bank of prisoners under sentence of death: about 400 were under sentence of death at the end of the war. All of these men were hostages for the good behavior of others. When attacks on the National Army took place, the Army Council searched around the bank of prisoners and fixed on those most closely connected with the attackers: executions followed. By the end of the war, eighty-three prisoners had been executed. Most of the executed prisoners were in their twenties or still teenagers. Most held low rank or no rank in the anti-Treaty faction. Apart from the Mountjoy executions only one other prisoner of high rank was executed. Others, like Liam Deasy, were spared because they signed the form and encouraged others to give up the fight. Ernie O'Malley was spared because of his record, although it was said by some that he was so ill that an execution might have drawn unfavorable comparisons to the execution of James Connolly. Pax Whelan, Michael Kilroy and many others of high rank were also spared."

"In the space of a few months, thousands of anti-Treaty prisoners and those suspected of being so were interned without trial in makeshift prisons and camps. Many of the prisoners were bent on disruption and escape, and their National Army guards had no training for the role of gaoler. Conditions were primitive and chaotic and ill treatment of internees became routine in the civil war. At least four were shot dead during escape attempts and perhaps that is not surprising in a conflict such as this. Four more prisoners were shot dead in prison for infractions of prison rules where there was no suggestion of an attempt to escape or use force against their captors. In addition, seventeen prisoners were killed in the Kerry landmine massacres."

"Following the Truce in July 1921, with few exceptions, the officers and men of the three Kerry brigades rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty. After the Free State army's attack on the Four Courts in late June 1922 at the start of the Civil War, these men again took up arms in defence of their Republic. In a campaign marked by brutality, summary executions and massacres, the Civil War dragged on bitterly for ten months. By the time of Frank Aiken's dump arms order in May 1923, Republican forces in North Kerry had been driven underground. In South Kerry they remained largely intact while fighting a guerrilla war with the invading Free State army which had reached a bloody stalemate. Ultimately the defence of the Republic failed. The defeated Republicans were precluded from employment under the new Free State administration and many disillusioned men to emigrate, largely to America. Those that remained regrouped into various factions. Most followed de Valera and his Fianna Fáil party into the constitutional politics of a twenty-six county state in 1927, while others remained resolute in their commitment to the Republics of 1916 and 1919 and, in the words of Liam Lynch, would 'serve under no other law'."

"As the Treaty terms were being hotly debated in the Dail Eireann- the Irish Parliament- the split in the ranks of the Irish Republican Army widened and flared into open war in the last week of June. Anti-Treaty forces (the 'Irregulars') had occupied the judiciary complex at the Four Courts by the Liffey, and were defying the Provisional Government and refusing to budge. From across the river, the National Army opened fire with artillery- the first shots rang out in a cruel civil war which was to last for two years, but whose effects were to be felt for much longer."

"While the buildup of men and machines continued, BF.I was taking an active part in the conflict. Observer/gunners were readily available, these were men who had never flown before but were well experienced in guerrilla warfare, some being veterans of the 1916 Rising. Russell was partnered by a former member of Collins' elite Active Service Unit, when he took off on the first sortie to support ground troops in Wicklow. The aircraft was armed solely with a standard infantry Lewis gun with which the observer engaged the Irregulars, firing it from his hip while dangerously balanced in his cockpit. The lack of armament on this and a second aircraft obtained from the RAF, perhaps underlined the original peaceful plans for the Air Service: its founders had refused guns, ammunition and bombs, which somewhat puzzled the donors. However, after the first sortie, warlike stores were accepted, once it became apparent that a real war was brewing up."

"Less lethal loads were also carried: leaflets were dropped to the Irregulars encouraging them to surrender, while copies of the Army journal, An t-Oglac, were showered on friendly troops. Russell established that the racecourses at Limerick Junction and Waterford would be suitable as advanced landing grounds, and he also flew reconnaissance missions from the Fair Green in Limerick City. Here, a landing mishap caused slight damage, which put the 'Brisfit' out of action for several weeks, before a Baldonnel team repaired it expertly in the open. To replace this aircraft, the SE.5a fighter was dispatched to Limerick but, suffering from a faulty compass and falling oil pressure, it landed off course in County Cork. While the pilot, Fred Crossley, sought help, Irregulars came on the scene and, having first removed its machine guns, ignited the aircraft which promptly blew up- it was carrying two 20lb (9kg) bombs! Thus unded the short career of the lone SE.5a, but shortly thereafter, the conflict in the Limerick area ended in victory for the regular troops."

"Meanwhile, the base at Baldonnel was singled out for a coup by the 'Irregulars', whose fortunes in the Dublin area were on the wane. They planned to seize the air base with the help of some sympathisers among the garrison. The jumping-off point for the attack was a wood close by the aerodrome, where 25 armed men were to rendezvous with a larger number of unarmed personnel, their task being to transport captured supplies. With the aerodrome secure, a former wartime pilot nicknamed 'The Deacon' (he had advanced to that stage of the Holy Orders before espousing the Republican cause) with an assistant, would commandeer an aircraft and attack Government buildings. The raid completed, the aeroplane was to land on Merrion Strand. In later years, the 'bomb aimer' described the plan as high farce. When he queried his pilot on various matters, 'The Deacon' always had a suitable reply, but when asked about the state of the tide at the time when they would be landing, he confessed that he had forgotten to check. Not surprisingly, when the raid on Baldonnel was cancelled, the young bomb aimer elect was greatly relieved because he had come to the conclusion that 'The Deacon' could not really fly an aircraft! However the aborted raid did result in casualties, three members of the Baldonnel garrison who deserted to the Irregulars for the planned operation, were subsequently captured, court martialled, and shot."

"From the beginning Michael was targeted by the anti-Treaty faction and as the sessions wore on the issue became not so much the Treaty itself, but the personal standing of Mick Collins. In the end, and to a very large extent, the voting reflected the love or hatred for him- there could be no half measures- of the individual deputies. During the stormy sessions, Michael was for the most part calm and dignified, even stoical at times; but now and then his famous temper would explode. Strangely enough, or perhaps characteristically, what seemed to rouse his ire most of all was the inability of deputies to arrive for each session on time, there by delaying the start of proceedings. With immense forcefulness he reminded them that punctuality was a great thing. Two factors were immediately apparent: the disagreement was set to divide opinion right across the country, and if Michael were the chief target of opprobrium he was not going to take it lying down."

"Seldom in the history of any country has a single unlucky bullet so utterly altered the course of events. Indeed, it would be no exaggeration to say that Ireland suffers the consequences to this day. Had Michael lived, it is highly probable that he would have brought the civil war to a speedy conclusion and succeeded in healing the breach with the North, leading to the removal of partition which few politicians, from Lloyd George and Churchill downwards, regarded as anything other than a purely temporary measure in 1922. After Michael's death, however, the South had no one with the breadth of vision and the negotiating skills to tackle Sir James Craig, and as time passed, the breach between North and South widened. Michael would almost certainly have prevented the Ulster boundary crisis of 1925, with its tragic consequences for Anglo-Irish relations over the ensuing seven decades. This arose when the report of the Boundary Commission was published, revealing that not an inch of Northern Ireland was to be ceded to the Free State, despite the wishes of at least a third of the inhabitants of the Six Counties. This bombshell reopened old wounds and almost triggered off a renewal of civil war in southern Ireland."

"The curlew stood silent and unseen In the long damp grass And he looked down on the road below him That wound its way through Beal Na mBlath And he heard the young men shouting and cursing Running backwards and forwards Dodging and weaving and ducking the bullets>br>That rained down on them From the hillside opposite. Just as quickly as it started the firing stopped And a terrible silence hung over the valley A lone figure lay on the roadside In the drizzling August rain Dressed in green cape coat, leggings, And brown hobnail boots That would never again Set the sparks flying from the kitchen flagstones As he danced his way through a half-set/ A hurried whispered act of contrition And the firing breaks out again The curlew takes to flight And as he flies out over the empty sad fields of West Cork With his lonesome call He must tell the world That the Big Fellow has fallen And that Michael is gone."

"Candles dripping blood, they placed beside your shoulders Rosary beads like teardrops on your fingers Friends and comrades standing by, in their grief they wonder why Michael, in their hour of need you had to go Michael, in their hour of need, why did you go?"

"And after truce and treaty and the parting of the ways He wore it when he marched out with the rest (and the best) And when they bore his body down on that rugged heather braes They placed the broad black brimmer on his chest"

"The Irish Civil War was not characterised by pitched battles fought between field armies; rather it was quite similar to the previous Anglo-Irish War. However in this campaign the anti-Treatyite fighters faced an Irish army which had the support of an increasing percentage of the population, especially among prosperous farmers and the middle classes who yearned for an end to the anarchy. Most importantly, the Provisional government had the support of the Roman Catholic Church. In this campaign the Army Council exhibited a great deal more tactical and strategic resource and guile than the British in the Anglo-Irish war. In addition, the Provisional government introduced draconian measures to suppress the rebellion, for example, summary execution of suspects without right or recourse to a trial. Seventy-seven Irregulars were executed (twice the number shot by the British), one of whom was Erskine Childers, the man who masterminded the Howth gun-running and who later attended the Anglo-Irish peace talks in London."

"The Provisional government's military goal was unambiguous, namely the suppression of armed rebellion by the republicans against the new Free State. To achieve this aim the 4000 strong National Army was quickly expanded to a strength of 60,000. Ten thousand British rifles were handed over to what Winston Churchill called "trustworthy Free State troops." Recruitment was not difficult as the onset of the post-war economic slump had created very high levels of unemployment. Nearly one thousand volunteers a day were recruited, many of whom had former service in the British Army. It was primarily an infantry-oriented army, although separate support arms and services were established."

"The first recorded use of military aircraft in the civil war was an air sortie against rebels in Dundalk in August 1922. The Air Service also undertook coastal patrols; the whole coastal area from Waterford to Kenmare Bay was constantly patrolled by Air Service aircraft. The day before the seaborne landings at Cork, Col. C.F. Russell flew over the city to reconnoitre the positions of anti-government forces. The use of military aircraft allowed the Dublin government to patrol the coasts of "rebel Cork," as well as to maintain contact with isolated garrisons, regardless of disrupted inland communications. The anti-Treatyites did not have any military aircraft in service."

"Initially the military balance was perilous as the Irregulars held sway over most of the west and south of Ireland. Even in Dublin, they had not been decisively defeated, rather they had gone to ground. The Free State's two main port cities, Limerick and Cork, were under the control of the Irregulars, and the River Shannon was beyond the Dublin government's control. It was General Michael Brennan, the Free State military commander in the Limerick area, who correctly summed up the situation: "the Shannon was a barricade and whoever held Limerick held the South and the West." Gen. Brennan firmly believed and with much justification that the outcome of the Irish Civil War turned on Limerick. The Irregulars, although numerically stronger and in possession of most of the Free State territory, did not move on Dublin. They surrendered the initiative to the National Army's forces and embarked on a systematic plan of destruction of all communications and anything that might be of assistance to the Free State army. In the course of this campaign of destruction, which in the words of the Conference of Roman Catholic Bishops "wrecked Ireland from end to end", the country's transport infrastructure was devastated: 236 bridges were damaged, 468 railway locomotives, carriages and other rolling stock were destroyed. The great railway viaduct over the Blackwater at Mallow linking Cork with the north was blown up. The reign of anarchy, which left factories and creameries destroyed and period mansion houses with their priceless art treasures burnt out, obliged the Provisional government to restore order as quickly as possible. In order to avoid a zone of isolation being created beyond the effective jurisdiction of Dublin, military formations were to be moved by sea thus avoiding a long and possibly costly overland advance."

"During the Civil War consideration was given by the British government to using the Royal Navy to help the Free State Army. However, it was decided that such an action was unnecessary and would only embarrass the Provisional government in Dublin. The Royal Navy remained aloof during the conflict, although its presence dominated Ireland's coastal waters."

"As the conflict spread many IRA men simply opted out of the fight. Those who remained active found a public that was significantly less supportive than they had been during the opposition to British rule. Another blow to the Republican cause was the attitude of the Catholic Church. While some individual clergymen offered their support to the Republicans, the Catholic hierarchy was extremely hostile to the IRA during the Civil War and actively and publicly supported the Free State."

"Men reacted differently to their experiences of revolution and rebellion. Recriminations followed defeat in the Civil War and morale collapsed in IRA units. One internal report on the local organization found that 'there is a lot of discontent down there and a lot of it purely personal'. Some still bore the physical scars of conflict. For example, Thomas 'Sweeney' Newell, who was shot by the British during the War of Independence, recalled, 'I was still wearing a steel body jacket with a steel rod attached to it and running down to the heel.' Many veterans spoke little to their families about the events they had been involved in. The son of one IRA volunteer learned about a major aspect of his father's past while reading a book in university. Other veterans veterans devoted considerable time and effort to ensuring that recognition and pensions were received by those who, it was felt, deserved it. For many, bonds of intense loyalty had been created and feelings of respect that lasted decades, even across the bitter Treaty divide."

"Many IRA officers also became involved in politics and Fianna Fáil, particularly, continued to be dominated by IRA veterans until the 1960s. Intensely nationalistic, even into old age, a twenty-six-county state failed to satisfy the aspirations of many veterans, even if few took part in or actively supported later IRA campaigns. Referring to partition, Petie McDonnell was to write: 'the cause for which they fought and were willing to give their lives, lives on'."

"In comparison to the War of Independence, there was relatively little activity in Clare during the Civil War, but nonetheless Claremen were active on both sides during that conflict. The very first Republican fatality of the Civil War was a Clareman: IRA Volunteer Joseph Considine from Clooney was shot dead by Free State Army soldiers in Dublin on 28 June 1922, shortly after the 'Battle of the Four Courts' began. At least ten IRA Volunteers and three Free State soldiers were killed in Clare during the Civil War, while Commandant Con MacMahon and Volunteer Patrick Hennessy, both natives of Clooney, were executed by a Free State Army firing squad at Limerick Jail on 20 January 1923."

"By the spring of 1923 it was clear to the Republicans that the Civil War was all but over and that the Free State had won. Frank Aiken, the IRA chief of staff, ordered all IRA Volunteers to dump their arms and to cease hostilities against the Free State Army from 30 April. The announcement of the ceasefire was not enough to save the life of Patrick O'Mahony, an IRA Volunteer who was executed by the Free State Army at Ennis Jail the morning after it was announced. Nor did the ceasefire save Christopher Quinn and William O'Shaughnessy, the last two Republicans killed in official Free State executions. Quinn and O'Shaughnessy were shot by a firing squad at Ennis on 2 May 1923, two days after the Civil War had ended."

"The Cold War stemmed from war, from the violence, fear and paranoia that conflict fostered, and from defeat and victory in two successive struggles, World War One and the Russian Civil War. Defeat at the hands of Germany and, even more, the social and political strain of conflict on an unprecedented scale in World War One (1914–18) led, in March 1917, to the fall of the Romanov dynasty in Russia and its replacement by a provisional, republican government. The dynasty had responded more successfully to the challenge of the Thirteen Years’ War with Poland in 1654–67, to the Great Northern War with Sweden in 1700–21, to wars with the Turks, Sweden and France between 1806 and 1815, and even to the brief French occupation of Moscow in 1812, than it was to do to war of a very different type with Germany."

"The same problems, of defeat at the hands of Germany, political division and social strain, weakened the Romanovs’ republican Social Democratic replacement, and this weakness provided the opportunity for a Bolshevik (Soviet Communist) coup in Russia later in 1917. The victory of the Bolsheviks over domestic foes and foreign intervention in the subsequent Russian Civil War (1918–21) ensured that their regime would not be short-lived, as for example was Communist rule in Hungary in 1919. The victory also furthered the identification of the Soviet regime with struggle, as well as giving such struggle a specific character. The war provided the regime with a strong rationale for opposition to Western states, notably the leading European empires, Britain and France, as well as the USA and, indeed, Japan."

"More of the literature looked for continuity between the Soviet Union and Romanov Russia, and notably with the expansionism of both, for example the search for warm-water ports. Yet, as with changes in other aspects of Russian life, for example the countryside, Communism provided, alongside elements of continuity, new ideology and direction for geopolitical drives as well as renewed energy. Communism ensured that there was a Leninist policy for international relations that was very different to the liberal internationalism supported by President Woodrow Wilson of the USA. Moreover, the resulting ideological divisions had major consequences for the practice, as well as content, of international relations."

"As another instance of the working out of themes, the early years of the Russian Revolution and the revolutionary regime proved crucial in the developing attitudes and experience of individuals who were to play a key role in the post-1945 period, most notably Joseph Stalin, the Soviet dictator from 1924 until his death in 1953. Similarly, as British Secretary for War in 1918–20, Winston Churchill, later Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945 and 1951 to 1955, sought to strengthen and sustain the war effort against the Communists during the Russian Civil War. This effort entailed British commitments to the new states of the area, such as Finland."

"The Russian Civil War is also instructive because the Cold War was quintessentially a military confrontation and a key episode in military history, as well as an ideological rift. Far from being contained short of conflict, the first challenge to the Soviet Union was a hot war involving armies and largescale military campaigns. Moreover, the Russian Civil War underlined the extent to which, in international and military terms, the Cold War did not simply entail rivalry between leading militaries deploying high-spectrum weaponry, as was to be the case for the Soviet Union and the USA after World War Two, notably with atomic weaponry and missiles. Instead, as was to be seen in the classic 1945–89 period of the Cold War, particularly in Africa in the 1970s, the Russian Civil War involved a range of forces and methods, both military and non-military: regular operations, insurrectionary and counter-insurrectionary conflicts, propaganda, and economic and commercial elements among them."

"In military history, the Russian Civil War is often brushed into a brief cul-de-sac, after a lengthy treatment of World War One, with the latter conventionally understood as the move into modern and total warfare. That approach is mistaken, not least because it fails to accept the military significance of the Russian Civil War and the modern and total war it represented, but also the degree to which the Soviet Union was born in the experience of civil war, and took on part of its character accordingly. This was a civil war that for long appeared to hang in the balance. For both sides, force was linked to fear in a sense of assault from linked threats, internal and external. The reaction on the part of the Communists was one of unparalleled brutality, although, even without the civil war, the Communists would probably have conducted themselves pretty much the same. Much of the content and tone of the writings before the Russian Civil War of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the Communist leader, predicted what would happen. However, a dream of violence was superseded by a grimmer reality. Such a trajectory was more generally the case for the establishment of Communist regimes. Others were born in the experience of civil war, including Albania, Yugoslavia, China, Cuba, Vietnam and Ethiopia, and such a trajectory would also have been true for would-be Communist regimes. Moreover, as with the Soviet Union, such civil war frequently overlapped with international conflict. This was frequently presented in terms of revolutionary struggle with imperial and colonial powers."

"While all these untoward events were taking place, amid a ceaseless chatter of well-meant platitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, a new and more terrible cause of quarrel than the imperialism of czars and kaisers became apparent in Europe. The Civil War in Russia ended in the absolute victory of the Bolshevik Revolution. The Soviet armies which advanced to subjugate Poland were indeed repulsed in the Battle of Warsaw, but Germany and Italy nearly succumbed to Communist propaganda and designs. Hungary actually fell for a while under the control of the Communist dictator, Bela Kun. Although Marshal Foch wisely observed that “Bolshevism had never crossed the frontiers of victory,” the foundations of European civilisation trembled in the early post-war years. Fascism was the shadow or ugly child of Communism. While Corporal Hitler was making himself useful to the German officer class in Munich by arousing soldiers and workers to fierce hatred of Jews and Communists, on whom he laid the blame of Germany’s defeat, another adventurer, Benito Mussolini, provided Italy with a new theme of government which, while it claimed to save the Italian people from Communism, raised himself to dictatorial power. As Fascism sprang from Communism, so Nazism developed from Fascism. Thus were set on foot those kindred movements which were destined soon to plunge the world into even more hideous strife, which none can say has ended with their destruction."

"In one of the ugliest wars of the twentieth century, the new Bolshevik government of Russia consolidated its power, fighting off numerous White armies consisting of monarchists and those who favored a less drastic form of socialism, as well as nationalist armies from border states such as the Ukraine, and the intervening forces of fourteen different foreign countries. In a conflict that raged across the length and breadth of the former Russian Empire, millions of lives were lost and the Soviet Union was eventually born, with its leaders scarred by terror, deeply paranoid, and xenophobic. The result was the autocratic USSR of Stalin's terror purges, the gulag, and the Cold War."

"This position by the Leninists of the necessity for a dictatorship to protect the revolution was not proven in the Civil War which followed the Russian revolution; in fact without support of the Anarchists and other left-wing forces, along with the Russian people, the Bolshevik government would have been defeated. And then true to any dictatorship, it turned around and wiped out the Russian and Ukrainian Anarchist movements, along with their left-wing opponents like the and Social revolutionaries. Even ideological opponents in the Bolshevik party were imprisoned and put to death."

"The other epidemic was Bolshevism, which for a time seemed almost as contagious and ultimately proved as lethal as the influenza. With the end of the war, Soviet-style governments were proclaimed in Budapest, Munich and Hamburg. The red flag was even raised above Glasgow City Chambers. Lenin dreamed of a 'Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia'. Trotsky declared that 'the road to Paris and London lies via the towns of Afghanistan, the Punjab and Bengal'. Even distant Buenos Aires was rocked by strikes and street fighting. In Russia itself, however, the Bolsheviks' authority was non-existent outside the big cities. Against them were arrayed three counterrevolutionary or 'White' armies led by experienced Tsarist generals: Anton Denikin's Volunteers, an army of many officers and few men which had started life on the banks of the Don, Admiral Aleksandr Kolchak's force in Siberia and General Nikolai Yudenich's in the north-west."

"Moreover, the Whites had foreign support. The Czech Legion had been formed by Czech and Slovak nationalists to fight on the Russian side against Austria-Hungary and at the outbreak of the Revolution numbered around 35,000 men. Determined to continue their fight for independence, the Legion's commanders decided to travel eastwards, along the Trans-Siberian Railway, with a view to crossing the Pacific, North America and the Atlantic and rejoining the fray on the Western Front. They took around 15,000 men with them. When the Bolsheviks at Chelyabinsk sought to disarm them the Czechs fought back. They then joined forces with the Socialist Revolutionaries in Samara, helping them to establish a Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (known as the Komuch) as a rival government to Lenin's. Between May and June, the Czechs swept eastwards, capturing Novo-Nikolaevsk, Penza, Syzran, Tomsk, Omsk, Samara and finally Vladivostok. Meanwhile, Russia's former allies sent expeditionary forces, whose primary aim was to keep Russia in the war. The British landed troops at Archangel and Murmansk, as well as at Vladivostok; the French sent men to Odessa, the Americans to Vladivostok. The Allies also supplied the White armies with weapons and other supplies. The Japanese seized the opportunity to march across the Amur River from Manchuria. Meanwhile, the cities that were supposed to be the headquarters of the Revolution emptied as factories closed and supplies of food and fuel dried up. When Denikin called on all the White forces to converge on Moscow in July 1918, it seemed more than likely that the Bolshevik regime would be overthrown."

"Nevertheless, from November 1918 onwards the tide of the civil war ran the Bolsheviks' way. By April 1919 Kolchak's forces had been beaten and by July Perm was back in Bolshevik hands, followed by Omsk itself in November. Denikin enjoyed some success in the Ukraine in the summer of 1919 but had lost Kiev by the end of the year. Yudenich's attempt to capture Petrograd had also failed, thanks in large measure to Trotsky's rallying of the city's defenders, who drove the defeated White army back into Estonia, whence they had come. General Peter Wràngel's Caucasian Army had captured Tsaritsyn that June, but by January 1920 it was clear that the war was effectively over. The Allies cut off their aid to the Whites. One by one the generals fled or, like Kolchak, were captured and executed. By the summer of 1920 Lenin felt confident enough to export the Revolution westwards, ordering the Red Army to march on Warsaw and confidently talking of the need to 'sovietize Hungary and perhaps Czechia and Romania too'. Only their decisive defeat by the Polish army on the banks of the River Vistula halted the spread of the Bolshevik epidemic."

"The Revolution had been made in the name of peace, bread and Soviet power. It turned out to mean civil war, starvation and the dictatorship of the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee and its increasingly potent subcommittee, the Politburo. Workers who had supported the Bolsheviks in the expectation of a decentralized soviet regime found themselves being gunned down if they had the temerity to strike at newly nationalized factories. With inflation rampant, their wages in real terms were just a fraction of what they had been before the war. 'War Communism' reduced hungry city dwellers to desperate bartering expeditions to the country and to burning everything from their neighbours' doors to their own books for heat. As the conscription system grew more effective, more and more young men found themselves drafted into the Red Army, which grew in number from less than a million in January 1919 to five million by October 1920, though desertion rates remained high, especially around harvest time. When the previously pro-Bolshevik sailors of Kronstadt mutinied in February 1921 , they denounced the regime for crushing freedom of speech, press and assembly and filling prisons and concentration camps with their political rivals."

"Aware that to establish a solid political base and carry out his revolutionary program he needed time, in March 1918 Lenin had his lieutenants sign at Brest-Litovsk a highly unpopular peace treaty with the Germans, Austrians, Turks, and Bulgarians in which he surrendered vast territories. And he unleashed a civil war in Russia as a prelude to the worldwide revolution, his ultimate objective. The Bolsheviks subsequently liked to blame the civil war that ravaged Russia for three years, claiming millions of lives, on Russian reactionaries and their foreign supporters. But, as we have noted, the transformation of the war from a conflict between nations to one between classes had been a central plank in the Bolshevik platform long before 1917. Trotsky admitted that much when he wrote, “Soviet authority is organized civil war.” In fact, it may be said that the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in order to make civil war."

"The history of Soviet Russia between 1917 and 1920 need not detain us. Suffice it to say that the Communists—the name the Bolsheviks adopted in 1918—won the civil war, in part because they controlled the populous center of the country, where the bulk of its industrial (and military) assets were located, in part because the Western powers extended to their opponents, known as “Whites,” only halfhearted support. In the course of the civil war and soon after its conclusion, the regime reconquered most of the non-Russian borderlands—the Ukraine, the Caucasus, and Central Asia—which had previously separated themselves. These were merged with Soviet Russia to form, in 1924, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. All the territories of the new empire were ruled, in fact if not in theory, by the same Russian Communist Party with headquarters in Moscow. Its branches penetrated every segment of organized life, serving, to use a term coined by Mussolini, who would model his Fascist rule on Lenin’s, as the “capillary organization of the regime.” No organization, not even of the most innocuous kind, could escape the Communist Party’s control. Thus emerged the first one-party state in history."

"There were times when our country was in even more difficult straits than today. Recall the year 1918, when we celebrated the first anniversary of the October Revolution. Three-quarters of our country was at that time in the hands of foreign invaders. The Ukraine, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Urals, Siberia and the Far East were temporarily lost to us. We had no allies, we had no Red Army - we had only just begun to form it; there was a shortage of food, of armaments, of clothing for the army. Fouteen states were pressing on our country. But we did not despond, we did not lose heart. In the fire of war we forged the Red Army and converted our country into a military camp. The spirit of the great Lenin animated us in the war against the invaders. And what happened? We routed the invaders, recovered all our lost territory, and achieved victory. Today the position of our country is far better than it was twenty-three years ago. Our country is now much richer than it was twenty-three years ago as regards industry, food and raw materials. We now have allies who together with us are maintaining a united front against against the German robbers. We enjoy the sympathy and support of all the nations of Europe who have fallen under Hitler's tyranny. We now have a splendid army and a plendid navy, who are staunchly defending the liberty and independence of our country. We experience no serious shortage of food, or of armaments or of army clothing. Our entire country, all the peoples of our country, support our Army and our Navy, helping them to smash the invading hordes of German fascists. Our reserves of manpower are inexhaustibe. The spirit of the great Lenin and his victorious banner now animate us in this patriotic war just as they did twenty-three years ago."