5 - Naseby (1645): ‘Non nobis Domine, non nobis’

Summary

Introduction

This chapter focuses on godly violence and military providentialism surrounding Naseby – an event that one historian considers the third ‘most important and decisive battle ever fought in England’. Victory made the downfall of the Stuart regime seem possible. Such an eventuality was unthinkable at the time of the Pequot War. Before that war, Charles I planned to bring Massachusetts Bay into political and religious subjection. These plans came to nothing, for he was soon occupied with the Bishop's Wars with Scotland (1639–1640) and the Irish Rebellion (1641). To finance the wars against the Scots, Charles called parliament after a lengthy Personal Rule (1629–1640). He hastily dismissed the first Short Parliament (April–May 1640). Members of the Long Parliament (called 3 November 1640) sought to secure their power and redress grievances before supplying funds for war.

Charles became increasingly aware that many in parliament sympathised with the religious and constitutional cause of their northern neighbours. A 12 July 1641 letter from English ministers to the Scottish General Assembly thanked God for ‘so miraculously prospering your late endeavours’. Like cargo in the ‘same [ship] bottome’, the just and holy causes in the two kingdoms ‘sink & sweem together’. They wrote this over a year before the official outbreak of war in England.

Since the escalation of hostility in the early 1640s, partisans proffered an increasing number of competing visions for church and state. The explosion of print amplified disagreements, and ‘many saints planted their own partisan flags in the rubble of episcopacy’, as David R. Como worded it. It was a time of political and religious creativity and fluidity: ‘This pattern of “transposition” – the migration of concepts or patterns of thought from the field of politics to religion, or vice versa – represents another underlying dynamic, identified in this study as implicated in intellectual change’. As a case in point, ‘Independency’ originally described an ecclesiastical stance, but the term quickly mutated into a ‘general political label’.

Scholars debate the short- and long-term causes of this war between parliament and crown. In documents dating from the Petition of Right (1628) until Charles fled London (1642), hundreds of claims were made against Charles and his government.