BBC_History_-_The_Life_amp_amp_Times_Of_The_Stuarts_2016_

ALAMY X3

The battle of

Naseby effectively

put victory beyond

Charles I’s forces

An Agreement of the

People called for fair and

frequent elections and

greater accountability

Westminster in 1647. By

now, parliament stood

accused of failing to

represent the people

Charles I / Britain’s civil wars

9. The Agreement of the People 1647

When London’s citizens demanded that parliament introduce radical reforms

8. The battle of Naseby

June 1645

When a longed-for parliamentary victory

sent the king fleeing to the Welsh borders

In 1647, the year following the end of the

First Civil War, the revolution took a new

turn. Previously, the conflict had been

purely between King Charles I and

parliament. Now it was also a battle

between the state, whether run by king

or parliament, and the citizen.

Parliament had won the war by methods

that made the prewar centralising policies

of Charles I look tame, creating a Puritan

church government as intolerant as the

Anglican one before it.

In the autumn, New Model soldiers and

London citizens, who had eagerly

supported parliament in the war,

submitted a charter of liberty, the

Agreement of the People, to the army’s

high command. It demanded radical

parliamentary reform, which would

guarantee fair and frequent elections

and establish the accountability of

parliaments, or ‘representatives’ as they

were henceforth to be called, to the

electorate. And it proclaimed ‘native

rights’ of the people, chief among them

freedom of worship, which no government

might invade.

Parliament, which had claimed to

fight the war as the representative of

the people, now found the idea of

representation aimed at itself. Though

the Levellers, as the promoters of the

agreement were derisively called, were

crushed by the army high command, their

ideas touched a nerve in national feeling.

Blair Worden

Naseby was all that Edgehill had been intended to be: that ‘one day of

battle’ that decided the outcome of the war once and for all. Fairfax’s

newly modelled army inflicted a crushing defeat on the royalist forces

and sent a demoralised king to find refuge in the Marquess of Worcester’s

vast fortress, Ragland Castle, in the Welsh borders – ironically, the very

bolthole that the king had planned for his retreat if he had lost control

of southern England in the autumn of 1640.

Following further reverses, Charles eventually surrendered to the Scots

in May 1646. The capitulation of the king’s former capital, Oxford, the

following month marked the end of the First Civil War.

But Naseby constituted more than simply the longed-for victory to end

the war. To many (even to those of the king’s party), it was a manifest

judgement of God – the Old Testament ‘God of Battles’ – on the justice of

the competing royalist and parliamentarian causes. And for those at

Westminster who had backed the controversial army reforms of the

previous winter, it provided the prospect of remaking the ‘commonwealth’

of England in a form that was republican in all but name. John Adamson