Everything You Wanted To Know About The Civil War | HistoryExtra Podcast - HistoryExtra
"‘Is it fair to say that it's a bit of a myth that one side was purely aristocratic on one side was purely middle classes or lower gentry? Because it seems quite broad?’
'Yeah, exactly. Because in a way, I think if we think about it, we can see the civil war would never have taken place in that case. If the king had only been able to rely on noblemen and gentlemen, they would never be able to raise armies. So I think it's probably true to say that there's a slightly larger number of nobleman and gentlemen, probably on the king’s side, but there are also many nobles and gentlemen on Parliament’s side as well. And the same is true, lower down the social hierarchy.
Yes, in London and perhaps in certain other parts, particularly in the southeast, Essex would be a good example. There, it does seem that the majority of ordinary people are on Parliament’s side. But in other parts of the kingdom, exactly the opposite is true. Wales is famously the nursery of the king’s infantry, and many of his toughest soldiers come from there. In Cornwall as well, many ordinary people on the king’s side. So across the whole kingdom, you know, there are also, you know, there are lots of lots of different reasons as we've seen for people supporting one side or another, and it certainly doesn't break down into a simple binary divide between lower class parliamentarians and upper class royalists.
Things were much more complex than that, and these allegiances as we've seen, often tend to rest in the end on sort of religious and cultural factors rather than socio-economic ones… people from all over the British Isles are engaged in fighting in the different kingdoms. So you know, Scots in Ireland, the Irish people in Scotland, English people in Ireland and in Scotland through all those interconnections, Cornish and Welsh people fighting all over England as well.
But in addition to that, there were many strangers as contemporaries term them, who came from beyond the British Isles. And again, there's a very sort of rich collection of characters who turn up to take part in Britain's wars. Some of them are actually mercenary soldiers who came here deliberately to fight. One of the classic examples of that is Captain Carlo Phantom, who was a Croatian from the Balkans who'd come all the way to England to fight. And he was asked on one occasion why he was here. And he said, I care not for your cause. I come to fight for your half crowns and your handsome women. And that may have summed up how a number of these mercenary soldiers felt. There were quite large numbers of them. The King actually had several entire regiments of French soldiers who were fighting for him. There were a number of people from the the new world of Godly Puritans from across the Atlantic, who came back from the English colonies there to fight on Parliament’s side.
The King’s own nephew, Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who is himself half German, he was one of the leaders of the king’s armies, and there were a number of other sort of very prominent European soldiers who fought in the armies of both sides. And some people came from even beyond Europe itself. We know that there were people from Mesopotamia, present day Iraq actually fighting in Parliament's armies at the end of the Civil War...
The best guesstimate, if you like that we can give is that perhaps somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 people may have died within the kingdom of England as a result of the civil wars. And if that is indeed the case, it would suggest that proportionately, the number of people who died in England as a result of the Civil Wars was actually greater than the number of people who died in England as a result of the First and Second World Wars put together... it's almost certain that things were even worse, what we know for certain they were even worse in Ireland and in Scotland, in Charles's other kingdoms'"
