Civil War:The Wars Of The Three Kingdoms 1638 1660

Description

On a warm late-summer's day in 1642 two rival English armies faced each other across the rolling Warwickshire countryside at Edgehill. There, Royalists faithful to King Charles I engaged the supporters of the parliament in a battle that left 1500 dead and many more wounded. Ahead lay other even more desperate battles such as Newbury, Marston Moor, Lostwithiel and Naseby that would take the fighting also to the north and west, creating heavy casualties, dividing families, ruining lives and destroying property.

Shrewdly analytical and brilliantly descriptive, Civil War draws on the political papers of the day (not just in London but in Edinburgh and Dublin too) as well as contemporary newspapers, letters and diaries. It also reveals how the new ideas and dispensations that followed from the wars - Cromwell's Protectorate, the Restoration of Charles II, the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688-9 - made it possible for the three kingdoms to progress towards union and to their own more distant futures as democratic societies.