Analysing the make-up and workings of the Royalist party in Scotland and Ireland during the civil wars of the mid-seventeenth century, Royalists at War is the first major study to explore who Royalists were in these two countries and why they gave their support to the Stuart kings. It compares and contrasts the actions, motivations and situations of key Scottish and Irish Royalists, paying particular attention to concepts such as honour, allegiance and loyalty, as well as practical considerations such as military capability, levels of debt, religious tensions, and political geography. It also shows how and why allegiances changed over time and how this impacted on the royal war effort. Alongside this is an investigation into why the Royalist cause failed in Scotland and Ireland and the implications this had for crown strategy within a wider British context. It also examines the extent to which Royalism in Scotland and Ireland differed from their English counterpart, which in turn allows an assessment to be made as to what constituted core elements of British and Irish Royalism.

What did it mean to be a Covenanter?

This is the first study of the interaction between warfare and national religious practice during the British Civil Wars. Using hundreds of neglected local documents, this work explores the manner in which civil conflict, invasion and military occupation affected religious practice. As Churches elsewhere in Britain and Ireland were dismantled and the country was invaded by a foreign English army, mid-seventeenth-century Scotland provides an important, yet neglected, point of entry in exploring the intersection between early modern warfare and religious practice. The book establishes a fresh way of looking at the conflicts of the mid-seventeenth century. No other study has explored how soldiers were quartered or marched in close proximity to parish worship, how their presence affected worship patterns and how the very idea of conflict in the mid-seventeenth century impacted upon the day-to-day lives of worshippers. Using the signing of the National Covenant in 1638 as its starting point, this perspective emphasises flexibility in religious practice and the dialogue between local communities, religious leaders and troops as a critical element in the experience of war.

During the Scottish Revolution (1637-1651), royalists and Covenanters appealed to Scottish law, custom and traditional views on kingship to debate the limits of King Charles I's authority. But they also engaged with the political ideas of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant and Catholic intellectuals beyond the British Isles. This book explores the under-examined European context for Scottish political thought by analysing how royalists and Covenanters adapted Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic political ideas to their own debates about church and state. In doing so, it argues that Scots advanced languages of political legitimacy to help solve a crisis about the doctrines, ceremonies and polity of their national church. It therefore reinserts the importance of ecclesiology to the development of early modern political theory.

This book explores the place of loyalty in the relationship between the monarchy and their subjects in late medieval and early modern Britain. It focuses on a period in which political and religious upheaval tested the bonds of loyalty between ruler and ruled. The era also witnessed changes in how loyalty was developed and expressed. The first section focuses on royal propaganda and expressions of loyalty from the gentry and nobility under the Yorkist and early Tudor monarchs, as well as the fifteenth-century Scottish monarchy. The chapters illustrate late-medieval conceptions of loyalty, exploring how they manifested themselves and how they persisted and developed into early modernity. Loyalty to the later Tudors and early Stuarts is scrutinised in the second section, gauging the growing level of dissent in the build-up to the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. The final section dissects the role that the concept of loyalty played during and after the Civil Wars, looking at how divergent groups navigated this turbulent period and examining the ways in which loyalty could be used as a means of surviving the upheaval.

This book offers a ground-breaking approach to royalism and popular politics in Europe and the Americas during the Age of Revolutions. It shows how royalist and counterrevolutionary movements did not propose a mere return to the past, but rather introduced an innovative way of addressing the demands and expectations of various social groups. Ordinary people were involved in the war and adapted the traditional imaginary of the monarchy to craft new models of political participation. This edited collection brings together scholars from France, Spain, Norway, and Mexico, to provide a transatlantic comparative perspective. It is a must-read for scholars and students looking to discover the lesser-known side of the Age of Revolutions, and the motivations of those who fought in the name of the king.

This book addresses a conundrum. Alone of the major competing political interests during the civil wars of the 1640s, royalism needed to transcend attachment to one nation or one religious tradition and recruit a support base in each of England, Ireland and Scotland. This book aims to provide a concise interpretation and reassessment of royalism during these crucial years and focuses on this dilemma, and on the resources, intellectual and practical, deployed to address it, with mixed success. It focuses on the key ideas and values which made royalism a formidable political alternative, rather than on the more usual factional, military or literary perspectives. It argues that a ‘three-kingdom’ perspective not only gives a broader view but also clarifies the distinctive characteristics of English royalism, more robust than its counterparts in the other nations.

Provides for a historical perspective of Scotland's interaction with the world beyond its borders. As one of the most prolific historians of his generation, Allan I. Macinnes, Emeritus Professor of History at the University of Strathclyde, has been foremost in promoting an international rather than insular approach to the study of Scotland. In a distinguished career he has written extensively on the Scottish Highlands, the British revolutions, the formation of the United Kingdom, the Jacobite movement, and Scottish involvement in the British Empire. The chapters collected here reflect the extent of these interests and a commitment to understanding Scotland - or indeed, other territorial units - in an international or global context. Covering a period from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, essays examine the complex interaction of the peoples of the British and Irish isles; they consider Scottish participation in Britannic and European conflict; and they explore Scottish involvement in business networks, political unions, and maritime empires. From intellectual and cultural exchange to political and military upheaval, Scotland and the Wider World will be key reading for anyone interested in the antecedents to Scotland's current international standing.

England's Islands in a Sea of Troubles examines the jurisdictional disputes and cultural complexities in England's relationship with its island fringe from Tudor times to the eighteenth century, and traces island privileges and anomalies to the present. It tells a dramatic story of sieges and battles, pirates and shipwrecks, prisoners and prophets, as kings and commoners negotiated the political, military, religious, and administrative demands of the early modern state. The Channel Islands, the Isle of Wight, the Isles of Scilly, the Isle of Man, Lundy, Holy Island and others emerge as important offshore outposts that long remained strange, separate, and perversely independent. England's islands were difficult to govern, and were prone to neglect, yet their strategic value far outweighed their size. Though vulnerable to foreign threats, their harbours and castles served as forward bases of English power. In civil war they were divided and contested, fought over and occupied. Jersey and the Isles of Scilly served as refuges for royalists on the run. Charles I was held on the Isle of Wight. External authority was sometimes light of touch, as English governments used the islands as fortresses, commercial assets, and political prisons. London was often puzzled by the linguistic differences, tangled histories, and special claims of island communities. Though increasingly integrated within the realm, the islands maintained challenging peculiarities and distinctive characteristics. Drawing on a wide range of sources, and the insights of maritime, military, and legal scholarship, this is an original contribution to social, cultural, and constitutional history.