5 – Bolton Massacre, 1644
For our next incident, we cycle forwards to the English Civil War. The English Civil War, which raged for nine years between 1642 and 1651, is not as well known as many other defining conflicts in British history, but it was as important a period in the making of the modern United Kingdom as any.
On a political level, it established the order of government that continues to this day at Westminster, in which the monarchy is secondary to the power of parliament and on a social level it lead to the advancement of the artisan and working classes to the detriment of the high-born. It follows from the social change that economically, that the merchant and entrepreneurial classes predominated over the landed aristocracy, while their religion, a more austere form of Protestantism, prevailed over the King’s Anglicanism. The geographic makeup of Britain was considerably altered, with the “English” civil war spreading extensively into Scotland and Ireland and the impact on regular people all over the islands was extreme: an estimated 85,000 people were killed in the fighting, but a further 127,000 died due to the disease epidemics that came with the war, notably outbreaks of plague, as well as famines related to the conflict. That amounted to something like a 3.7% loss of the entire population of England, 6% in Scotland and a whopping 41% in Ireland. The wrath wreaked on the Irish is worth a whole other section in itself, and it will get one.
The nub of the war, and the reasoning behind our latest massacre, was the dispute between the Royalists, who supported the right of the King (namely Charles I) to set his own laws, and the Parliamentarians, who wanted sovereignty to lie with the Parliament, lead by Oliver Cromwell. The town of Bolton, to the west of modern day Manchester, was a Parliamentary stronghold – befitting its population of merchants, Calvinist Protestants and skilled artisan workers – while the surrounding rural areas, with landowning gentry and a poor population that depended on them, favoured the King. The Royalists had attempted to attack Bolton on several occasions and on May 28 1644, they would be successful.
The forces of Prince Rupert, the King’s German cousin, advanced on the town in typical Northern English rain and overcame a garrison of 4,000 Parliamentarian soldiers to enter the city. They routed the defenders, killing a thousand and capturing many more, as well as field materiel. Moreover, they plundered the town extensively, with little regard for who was a combatant and who was a civilian. The numbers of dead make no distinction between the two.
It had been expected that Rupert would, as was the accepted military tactics of the time, begin a lengthy siege of the town, but instead he attacked and overran Bolton. As there was no siege, there were no conditions of battle laid out and therefore it was within the accepted constraints of conflict at the time for Rupert’s men to massacre civilians and noncombatants.
Bolton was, in the grand scheme of things, not that important a town, but the experiences of unrestrained bloodlust and disregard for civilian life was one that would mark out the English Civil War as it continued.
