[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it pissed me off so much. And then I saw Elon Musk. Someone said, are you getting the vaccine? And Elon goes, no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just, it's, it is, it's so upsetting. Does my hair look good? I just got a haircut. It feels kind of like, round here.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually, for a look, it'd be fun. If we were doing like, dress up, I'd bleach it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'd rather shave off my eyebrows and head. Oh yea, for-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For a video, yeaah. How come, I wanted to ask you, what's the deal with your black hands? You do black hands. It's racist.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's awesome. I saw it and I was like, dude, what, it looked like you had a tanning accident where you were like, wow, I can't believe, how much you pay her?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, it's like listen, I got shit, look, I make minimum wage while you fucking with me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's all I have. Oh, he's sick. That's not him. I'm 5'11, I'm not even that tall. But like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think I saw the photo where everyone was like, this is obviously fake. It was like a Valentine's Day thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm pranking the media. Yeah, my phone is just full of fetal alcohol babies. Thank you, Trisha. If you guys are curious. It just looks like a normal kid, what, has he got a big forehead?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But doesn't affect like your mental acuity too? But you're pretty sharp, I think.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm gonna prank people to thinking I'm a scumbag. It's like, hey. It's not a prank.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what's interesting? When I was a kid, Jonathan Taylor Thomas was like the heartthrob, do you remember that? And I look back at pictures, here let me pull it up. And I, John, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But, like, it was the hair parting and everything, it's just so funny, like. Where is he at? Look at this hair, it's like a straight up fuckin' whole body mullet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't remember, but, but you wanna see what he looks like now? It's kinda interesting to see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is it bad to say he looks like a lesbian? I can't say he looks like a lesbian?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he looks like a lesbian. That just means like, you look like Ellen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cause there's a lot of guys that like, look like Alan. And I think it's funny to say, you look like a lesbian. No good? Moses gave me a thumbs up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm not saying take the rights away, I'm just saying he looks like a lesbian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shoutout to Joel Ossien, is this really the time? I mean, talk about hate. Joel Ossien is not pro gay rights.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but what if, what if he likes the Jews and hates the gays? Joel Ossian hates the gays.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are they making- are they making it a better offer? Like a more lucrative?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't say, Jonathan Taylor Thomas looks like a lesbian, and then say, I wanna give a shout out to Joel Austin, who literally hates gay people. He does not. Oh, here it is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well maybe it's not that th- They just think it's the same. They think it's the same.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They think you're gonna go to hell and that- a lot of them think that you're causing hurricanes, I've even heard that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, they think it's a choice, and they're choosing to go the- walk the devil's path. Because they wanna be gay, which is straight-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, so now that we've covered that, Joel, you gotta admit that he looks like a lesbian. A little bit. Jonathan Taylor Thomas. He's handsome.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know, I showed you a picture of him now, what am I, what am I, his fucking biographer?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wish that, um, Joe lost him a cry on these fries. Add some salt.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were just trying to get things up and then we put it up like, like 10 minutes early just cause it was ready. But that's messed up because there's a lot of people that get there on time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What did she mark that sold out? What could it possibly be?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because Jeffrey, by the way, he made this tweet, he's like, good morning to everyone but that guy, that hair guy, that said rude things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Literally five days later, blocked you, followed him back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think you're right, it's pretty much him being like, I can do whatever the fuck I want.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well clearly nobody's buying it, I mean, if it's been on his website, how long ago was that series?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, you have it. You touched the rim, I don't want it anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What? No, a bit from the back. What are you, crazy?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I actually put a big down payment on my house, so my mortgage is low. So what Jeffrey BrokeAssStar said is he's had a mortgage on his house.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I hope he makes one about David. I watched the shit out of that boy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just think it, well, I'm a fan, but I think he keeps it real. That's his whole thing, right? He can't be a stan of anyone. That's right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tell me about your dream. You clearly came here with an agenda. Tell me about your dream.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, okay. Was it a premonition or a dream?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're gonna ascend to late night and say, Ethan, I'm sorry.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've had a good thing, but I have to leave you behind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm pretty content, I'm not looking to move up anywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You plan on being late night? I don't see that either. I think both can happen. With peace and love. A rapping late night host?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, we were like such- Look, I'm not- I would never say a bad thing about him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On a personal level, as someone I consider like a close friend, it did, it kinda, it did hurt my feelings. But on the other end, I understand...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was having his friends make out with me too, which was weird I didn't understand why.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, we were, we were, we were like ha- we were like very good friends.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it's fine. Like I said, I don't have any, and well, I have nothing but nice things to say about the guy. He's a sweetheart. And uhm...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I wish him well. It's not, there's really no ill will at all. He's like,


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[Assistant] It makes sense, like, he became his rise to fame, like, when I met him, he was like, didn't even put out his first album, you know? And so I saw this gradual, like, uh, road, this like crazy stardom. Not like stardom, but he's like one of the biggest artists in the country, you know? So like, he just, he got kind of more and more distant as he got more and more famous.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think it's just because his life was just too fast paced and crazy. He was working and he's, there's just like, I don't know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As much as I'd like to say Papa John, I don't think that we're in the right age bracket for Papa.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Worked out well. Maybe it's good they didn't find anyone that good because look.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe if they found someone that was like, kinda good, maybe this wouldn't happen. Maybe just nobody good applied. That's what I kinda said, but you sure don't wanna hear that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know why, why'd you guys put 18 year olds in college? You said you wanted broke losers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let's lower, let's lower our, our standards for the Bachelor a bit. Let's say maybe,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, he says he was joking, but I, I don't think so. You heard the recorder.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We text and sometimes we hang out during like, not that much honestly, maybe a few times a year.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, I talked to my- I have like a family chat with my family and we all talk there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, some people have that relationship and my brother's my brother. It's not like, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I like chicks. That's true. It's not gay if I eat this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People watched it, people liked it, got a lot of views. You know what's called views?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah. I'm just saying, people liked it. They watched- I didn't watch it so I don't know, but-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just the color. It's just two, these two colors are.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I have been doing this for a while just to say no. The video podcast.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what? I can't even- Dude, Frenemies is off the fucking rails.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Dude, you gotta be kinda low-key happy when drama goes down, cause you make long-ass videos with a billion mid-rolls, and I know you're getting paid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, you're right. YouTube, but isn't that nice? Now you don't have to be like, I wasn't me!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I should stop. Do you know how, if I didn't put it in automatically on our podcast, we'd have like a hundred mid-rolls.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Money, boy, because let's face it, Trisha's gonna outgrow my fuckin'...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That sounds like the kinda stuff. He's like, hey, listen. No fat people allowed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You told me that! You said you're 220 and I said-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No food for fatty. Hugh will literally went to the kitchen and said, don't feed Trisha anymore, she's too fat.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, that's like a legal thing. Oh. With peace and love. Maybe allegedly. Your honor, this is not defamation. With peace and love was issued before the defamatory comment. This is my hunch is that he does illegal shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or super shady shit. Yeah, super shady shit. He seems like the type of guy that will like...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like give predatory loans, you know what I mean? Cause that kind of dude gives like quick money loans and shit like that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That should be fucking illegal. The fact that that shit is illegal blows my mind. They're like, yea, 30,000% interest rate. That's normal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the way, he pays those girls to hang out with him, it's like not that co- serious.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Also, it's like cool, you're rich and a bunch of girls want to be around you. It's like cool, dude. Epic.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well thank you, finally you come around, took him to threatening my life.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Especially ones that have threatened my life. People thought in the comments that you should have came in right for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Greg Paul, GP coming at ya. His dad used to live in a van outside Jake Paul's house and, and he had a leaked s- I swear to god somebody hacked his phone and his dad was having sex with like these little hussies that were with Jake like-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He moved to like Florida to become a boxer, which is like laughable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, no, Ian's gonna conduct a whole regiment for us.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeaah. I want it to be real. And also I don't want to exercise.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just a matter of fact, it's not like a compliment. Okay, here we go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, you think we could roll around in these benches, in these fucking curtains? It's a curtain.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, you gotta go up to get the momentum first. And by the way, your momentum is running straight into the earth.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just like, like, I just think that if I keep talking about it, people are not gonna, are gonna stop taking it seriously.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No, I can't, I can't, I can't keep doing it. I'm not, it's not my, I'm not the David Dobrik guy, you know. I, like you said, if people have stories, come out and say it, and then maybe I'll see it and talk about it, but the thing about Big Nick and Seth, these are both people who tried to share their stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But didn't get the attention that they deserved.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And these are also two people that were like intimately involved in the vlog squad. Like, they're... have the most trustworthy...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not, not that this person's not trusted, but like the most, let's say, credible, because they're in the videos, there's like so much there, you can't really even... Like what Seth said, you can't, there's no two ways about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and by the way, I like, I spoke to Seth and Nick a little bit afterwards and they were both like super, they both expressed feeling like super relieved that they were able to get their message out to a receptive audience.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, I don't know on the other hand. Oh, there's like a documentary coming about Woody Allen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And his, and his wife slash daughter-in-law, or stepdaughter.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's coming out on HBO too, it's like serious shit. It's not like some lifetime shit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He raised this girl from th- oh, from nine?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So he raised his little girl from 5 and then got intimate with her when she was like 16. Sorry.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's fucked up. Okay, even if you're going to, even if you wanna fuck your s- your stepdaughter, let's wait till she's 18.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] How you gonna fuck your own stepdaughter and then marry her? They're still married though.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, we thought about it for a long time and then, uhm, we have a guy who does clips for us?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he's really good. He's like the best. And so he's like


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He has a ton of clips because we've been doing clips on Instagram and Facebook already.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, yeaah, he's the one that does the clips. So, he just started posting, posting, posting a TikTok and it's like, doing really well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So what happened, okay, I'm, my name on TikTok is Ethan Klein H3. I woke up yesterday and it was Teddy, and I saw all the comments. It was like, why is it Teddy Fresh? I was like, why, what happened with Teddy Fresh? And then I saw, my fucking TikTok name now is Teddy Fresh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, I realized what happened. So, I wanted to make a Teddy Fresh TikTok account.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then there's a Teddy Fresh account that's inactive, like totally inactive. Dead. Like no followers, no posts. So I wrote to...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A TikTok or like someone I know who knows TikTok and I said, Hey, can we get the Teddy fresh account for our business? And he says, I'll see what I can do. And that was like two weeks ago. And so I woke up yesterday and they switched my fucking personal account to Teddy fresh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We both call each other Ted. That's like our pet names for each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so then, well, we were brainstorming ideas.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so we were just thinking of like Teddy, we were trying to think of like what would be like a logo, and also the other thing is like what's a website domain that's available. And so we were trying a bunch of stuff, and it's so weird that Teddy Fresh, with the Teddy Bear logo, and the domain Teddy Fresh was unclaimed after all these years, which I thought was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, but on all the other social medias it was taken, so I thought that was weird.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know what's funny? The teddy... Oh, actually I don't want to talk about the other thing, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because it's too, it's like personal info thing, nevermind. But uhm, uhm, yeaah, we were in a, we were in a legal battle with Ted Talks. No, I'm kidding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was like, what the fuck would you give a TED talk about? Squirting?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shout everybody out, I'll pay you. What am I, a fucking shout out monster? I have money, let me pay you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I do currently, we are living in the society where money for service. I don't do any fucking, no bullshit with shoutouts. Money for service. How do you charge other people? Money. Say, money for service.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I did buy, they only sent me like two, and I was like, can I get more? They're like, no.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right, but that's after COVID, they got vaccines, people feel more comfortable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, that's something about it. It's like, cause it takes, okay, first of all, having sex takes a lot of work, so it takes that out. So now you can just lay there and you're still kinda having sex, but you're just kinda watching. It's the best, I feel like. It's so much better. I love watching, I prefer watching than like, actually doing it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or a friend. A stranger or a friend? A stranger. Probably a stranger. Yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you're done with this episode, go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions. That again audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By going to that address, you qualify for a free book download when you sign up for a 30 day trial membership.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's no obligation to continue the service and you can cancel any time and keep the free book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You can also keep going with one of the monthly subscription options and get great deals on all future audiobook purchases.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Feel free to submit anything you think other listeners might enjoy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There is now an audible recommendations tab at revolutionspodcast.com. So first go there and recommend something and then go to audiblepodcast.com forward slash revolutions so that they remember why they sponsor me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We left off last time with the growing resistance in England to the personal rule of King Charles, especially in matters of taxation and religion.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This week, we are going to find out what happens when Charles and Archbishop Laud try to extend their dream of religious unity up to Scotland, and it is not going to be pretty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As I mentioned in the first episode, Scottish Presbyterianism was laced with a healthy distrust of the state.


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[Assistant] But the kind of wholesale revisions that Charles and Laud had in mind? Well, let's just say that the Scots went from zero to open rebellion in just about six months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The trigger for that open rebellion was the decision to introduce the Anglican Book of Common Prayer into the Scottish churches.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In theory, every parish is supposed to be using it and using it in the same way, although in reality fights over how to use the Book of Common Prayer played a huge role in the running battles between Archbishop Laud and, well, practically everyone else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Scots of course had their own version, called the Book of Common Order, and they were pretty attached to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But as we discussed last week, Charles and Laud were convinced that the people of Britain should adhere to one uniform religion, and that one uniform religion was going to be based on the Anglican Book of Common Prayer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On Sunday, July 23, 1637, by order of the King, the Dean of St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh began to read from the Book of Common Prayer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As soon as he started to speak, the place went crazy.


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[Assistant] The ladies of the congregation took the lead, pelting the assembled nobles in the front row with anything that wasn't nailed down. Someone threw a chair at the dean's head, bible studded against the wall, there was pushing, shoving, shouting.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The crowd gathered in the streets, then joined in the fun. Beating on the doors of the church, chucking rocks at the windows, hurling insults at no one in particular.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Bishop of Edinburgh made a break for it, and he was stoned as he ran off. The terrified Dean locked himself in the steeple.


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[Assistant] It is possible that King Charles underestimated how fiercely the Scots planned to defend their native religion.


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[Assistant] All across Scotland, parishioners were up in arms about the new services.


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[Assistant] Through the rest of the summer, petitions flooded in demanding the King leave the Scottish Church alone to please not destroy the only true religion in all of Christendom.


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[Assistant] The King's own allies in Scotland begged him to reconsider what he was doing, but Charles refused to listen. And all he did to mollify the Scots was send back messages telling everyone to get on board.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Riots periodically hit Edinburgh to the point where Charles ordered his ruling council out of the city, taking with them one of the key economic pillars of the capital, which led to yet another riot.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the winter, the Scots begin to organize a formal nationwide resistance.


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[Assistant] In February 1638, the King's Lord High Treasurer for Scotland, the Earl of Traquoir, told the King that if he wanted to persist in this policy, that it was going to take 40,000 soldiers to do it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was probably supposed to mean, so, you know, give it up, sir.


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[Assistant] But Charles heard, okay, well, let's raise an army of 40,000 soldiers. Never mind that this was basically impossible, which was Trequoir's point.


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[Assistant] Just as the king was being told that it would require military occupation to impose the Book of Common Prayer, the Scots were busy organizing to prevent just such a military occupation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On February 28, 1638, the first batch of angry Scottish lords signed a document called the National Covenant, which was a pledge to uphold true religion in Scotland at all cost.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was pretty clear that the pledge promised a national rebellion if Charles persisted in his religious innovations.


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[Assistant] Most because they believed in the cause, but a few because men who refused were targets of harassment, so best to just make your mark.


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[Assistant] Charles, as I mentioned, responded to all of this not by rethinking his strategy, but by following Traquoir's advice, and raising an army.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But building an army takes time, especially if you're living in 17th century England and you don't have a standing army yet.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So in May, Charles sent the Marquis of Hamilton up to Scotland to open negotiations with the Covenanters, which is what we now call these rebellious Scots.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hamilton was a Scottish lord who had been raised in England alongside Charles. He was absolutely loyal to the king, but as soon as he arrived, he got the sense that 40,000 soldiers might not be enough. 100,000 might not be enough.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, hopping back and forth between Edinburgh and London, Hamilton convinced the king to call a church assembly, to try to work through the issues peacefully.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Calling an assembly served Charles' goal of keeping the Scots occupied until he was ready to deal with them, but Hamilton was hoping that maybe he could control the assembly and defuse the situation before it got out of hand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In late November 1638, the Glasgow Assembly, so called because it met in Glasgow,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Opened for business. But it immediately slipped out of Hamilton's control.


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[Assistant] First of all, the leading covenanters, through a mixture of coercion and genuine popularity, secured practically every seat in the assembly for themselves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then they barred the Scottish bishops, the one major group who actually supported Charles, from entering the hall.


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[Assistant] So Hamilton walked into the room and found himself facing a mob of overheated Scotsmen whipped into a frenzy by a mixture of national pride and religious zeal with nary an ally in sight.


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[Assistant] Ignoring Hamilton's attempts to guide the proceedings, the Covenanters went far beyond simply repudiating Charles' recent innovations, and started stripping out every reform made to their church since King James had emerged from his minority back in the 1580s, and that included tossing out the entire Episcopal hierarchy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hamilton had no choice but to admit that he had totally lost control, and after a week he marched in and announced that the Glasgow assembly was hereby dissolved.


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[Assistant] Which is when he found out just how totally he had lost control.


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[Assistant] The assembly ignored the order and sat for another three weeks in express violation of a royal command to disperse, which was basically treason.


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[Assistant] When they finally adjourned in late December, everyone knew that come the spring, it was going to be war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Meanwhile, down in England, Charles was busy preparing for that war.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had already settled for well short of the 40,000 Traquire had suggested. And the plan now called for an army of 20,000 to march north and meet the Covenanters head on, while another 5,000 flanked them by sea.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But Charles was discovering that just because a plan is written on paper, that doesn't mean it's going to just magically appear in reality.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As it turned out, the English were pretty ambivalent about what Charles was doing in Scotland, and they weren't super eager to risk their lives for something they basically didn't care about.


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[Assistant] And that is to say nothing of the English Puritans, who were not merely ambivalent, they actively sympathized with the Scots.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So while the Scottish spent the winter raising a passionate army absolutely ready to risk their lives,


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[Assistant] Charles spent the winter raising a sullen collection of vagabonds who were ready to desert the first chance they got.


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[Assistant] Despite all of these problems, however, Charles was still convinced in the spring of 1639 that victory would be his. And he wasn't totally crazy.


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[Assistant] The Scots had managed to put together an army of about 12,000 men, which meant that, despite their zeal, they were still outnumbered.


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[Assistant] Something their general, a career soldier named Alexander Leslie, who had risen to the rank of Field Marshal in the legendary army of King Gustaf of Sweden, could plainly see. It was clear that invading England was out of the question, and that fighting period was probably a bad idea.


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[Assistant] Best to just use the saber rattling as a negotiating tactic, rather than actually pulling the sabers out and fighting, but King Charles had other ideas.


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[Assistant] The first bishop's war, as it is now called because it was sort of about whether the abolition of episcopacy pushed through by the Glasgow assembly was going to stick,


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[Assistant] Got started in May 1639 when the Marquis of Hamilton attempted to land that English flanking force of 5,000 men.


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[Assistant] But as it turned out, A, Hamilton's men were untrained and unequipped, and B, well-trained and well-equipped Covenanters were sitting there at the Firth of Forth, ready to meet them.


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[Assistant] Famously, Hamilton's own mother came out with a pistol and promised to shoot her son dead if he tried to land. So Hamilton did not try to land. Which threw the whole English strategy into disarray.


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[Assistant] Charles decided that maybe now wasn't actually the best time for a fight, so he and the Scots got together at Berwick-upon-Tweed in June 1639 to talk truce.


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[Assistant] The resulting pacification of Barrick was no one's idea of a treaty.


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[Assistant] The Scottish commissioners made the unmeatable demand that the acts of the Glasgow assembly be ratified, while Charles was once again negotiating not to negotiate, but to play for time.


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[Assistant] Instead, the king called for another church assembly to meet in August, and then a Scottish parliament to meet in September.


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[Assistant] If he could control those bodies and get them to repeal the work of the Glasgow assembly, so much the better.


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[Assistant] The pacification of Barrick was signed June 18, and everyone got to work making sure that they were better prepared when the war inevitably started up again the next year.


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[Assistant] Ironically, the first bloodshed of the bishop's wars, and thus the first bloodshed of the whole series of revolts and civil wars that engulfed the British Isles over the next 20 years, took place the day after the pacification of Barrick was signed.


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[Assistant] Up in Aberdeen, a force of Scottish Royalists, yes, they did exist, pushed the local Covenanters out of town for a little while, but on June 19, the Covenanters came back and, in a bloody skirmish, seized the nearby Bridge of Dee, paving the way for the retaking of Aberdeen.


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[Assistant] The skirmish at the Bridge of Deep is also notable because the Covenanter force was led by the Marquis of Montrose, a popular and eminently crafty Scottish lord who was about to become the king's best friend in Scotland.


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[Assistant] Eventually, we'll see him string together a series of victories in the Scottish theatre of the First Civil War that very nearly tipped the whole balance of the fight in the King's favour.


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[Assistant] But for now, he remained, like almost every patriotic Scotsman, a staunch Covenanter.


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[Assistant] Charles returned to London in July and set to work trying to raise, equip, and finance a better army.


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[Assistant] Charles had managed to get through the skirmishes of 1639 by pushing his credit to the breaking point and securing loans from sympathetic nobles.


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[Assistant] Unfortunately, most of those willing to give also happened to be Catholics, which did nothing to ease anyone's fears that Charles was intent on undoing the Reformation in Britain.


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[Assistant] But with his first run at the Scots having gone nowhere, the money was all dried up.


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[Assistant] So if he wanted to keep the conflict going, he was going to have to call another parliament. There was no other way to get the money he needed.


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[Assistant] The new Church Assembly met in August and simply ratified everything the Glasgow Assembly had ever done. The Scottish Parliament met shortly thereafter, and they started pushing through constitutional reforms to go with the religious reforms.


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[Assistant] They somehow managed to keep themselves in session through September and October, but were finally broken up by the king in November.


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[Assistant] Whatever thin hope remained that the war would not start again in the spring, died when the Scottish parliament disbanded.


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[Assistant] It might seem odd that Wentworth would be begging the king to call parliament,


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[Assistant] The thing he saw clearly was that there was no way to fund an aggressive war against the Scots without parliamentary subsidies. It just couldn't be done.


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[Assistant] The thing he believed very much was that parliament could be controlled.


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[Assistant] had mastered the art of controlling the Irish parliaments, and he didn't see why an English parliament couldn't be just as easily manipulated.


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[Assistant] But he underestimated the anger that had grown up during the 11 years of personal rule, and then he overestimated Charles' willingness to even pretend like that anger was legitimate.


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[Assistant] But the king decided that he wanted a war with the Scots more than he didn't want to call another parliament, so call another parliament he did.


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[Assistant] On April 13, 1640, the first English parliament in 11 years met in Westminster.


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[Assistant] The attending MPs were filled with a mixture of excitement and suspicion. They were eager for the opportunity to get back in the game, but wary of the intentions of the King.


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[Assistant] But, Charles needed money, and they had some issues they wanted addressed, so there was no reason they couldn't come to some sort of agreement, right? Right.


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[Assistant] The opening session began with a speech delivered by the king's messenger, Lord Finch.


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[Assistant] Which was a provocative enough act on its own, given that he had been the speaker of the last parliament. Remember? The guy who had been held down in his chair?


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[Assistant] Once they had voted that money, the king would hear their complaints. That is how this was going to run.


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[Assistant] But anyone with half a brain knew that as soon as they voted the money, Charles would be free to ignore those complaints.


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[Assistant] So the emerging parliamentary leadership responded that no, first we deal with our complaint and then we vote the money.


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[Assistant] They backed this up by launching into a series of speeches, headlined by John Pym, who as I said was one of the few veteran parliamentarians returning from the sessions of the 1620s.


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[Assistant] He ticked off a laundry list of grievances, illegal taxation, unjust imprisonment, creeping potpourri, and demanded action.


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[Assistant] Because the members simply could not be expected to return home and say that after 11 years they had dealt with exactly none of the things their constituents had sent them to deal with.


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[Assistant] But Pym and his colleagues remained unpersuaded by the king's arm-waving and held their ground.


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[Assistant] And not only were they unpersuaded, but harder line elements in both the Commons and the House of Lords were actually engaged in some pretty treasonous correspondence with the Covenanters. They wanted the Scots to win, and so they were happy to deny Charles the means to fight them.


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[Assistant] But those hardliners were not a majority. And finally, the commons told the king that they would drop a few of their bigger complaints if the king would agree to drop his illegal taxes. Most especially the hated ship money.


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[Assistant] The king, after much cajoling, agreed to the terms.


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[Assistant] Now it is likely that had Charles opened with this offer, I'll drop ship money in exchange for subsidies, everything would have worked out.


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[Assistant] But his initial high-handedness had rubbed a lot of the members the wrong way.


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[Assistant] And so when the king told them how much money he required, an unprecedented 12 subsidies, they balked, even with the ship money deal in place.


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[Assistant] So instead of just voting Charles the money, as had been privately arranged, the Commons instead started debating whether or not to give him the money on May the 4th.


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[Assistant] And they wound up talking all day and adjourning for the night without coming to a decision.


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[Assistant] Charles, outraged at Parliament's dilly-dallying, apparently snapped at this point, called his Privy Council together on May the 5th, and told them that he planned to dissolve Parliament.


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[Assistant] The only pushback to this decision came from the Earl of Northumberland, who was about to have to leave the army. The King was apparently giving up on funding properly.


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[Assistant] And the Earl of Stratford, who just a minute ago was Thomas Wentworth, but now he's the Earl of Stratford because those are the confusing naming conventions of British history. He thought the king was being short-sighted.


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[Assistant] I should mention at this point too, that Strafford also said something at this meeting. That was pretty innocuous.


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[Assistant] But that really came back to haunt him. And we will get into that next week.


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[Assistant] Charles, though, had made up his mind. On May the 5th, 1640, Parliament was dissolved after a session lasting just three weeks, and that's why we call this Parliament the Short Parliament.


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[Assistant] Having given up on parliamentary subsidies, Charles went right back to the illegal taxes he had so recently promised to abandon.


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[Assistant] Ship money was pursued with a new zeal, and thus resisted with an equally new zeal.


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[Assistant] Then the king compounded his PR problems by trying to arrange loans from the hated Spanish, while simultaneously ordering Stratford to organize an army in Ireland, composed mostly of Catholic levies.


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[Assistant] So here we have the king trying to take catholic money to pay catholic troops to go fight good honest protestants.


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[Assistant] More and more people were coming to believe that the greatest threat to England was not the Scottish rebels, but the King himself.


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[Assistant] The soldiers weren't being paid. There was no equipment. Something like a third of the men didn't even have weapons.


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[Assistant] And yet, happy in his bubble, Charles set off on August the 20th somehow convinced that he was about to win this thing.


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[Assistant] That same day, the Scottish General Alexander Leslie, far more confident now that his army had swelled to 20,000 men,


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[Assistant] Cross the river Tweed and entered England, starting the Second Bishops' War.


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[Assistant] Leslie maintained strict discipline after the crossing, because he knew that in the end this was going to come down to a political settlement, so he strictly forbade any sacking or looting that might sour potential English allies.


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[Assistant] The English army that attempted to stop the Scots, as I said, was pretty hopeless.


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[Assistant] They had spent their limited time, energy, and resources fortifying Barrick, which they assumed the Scots were headed to first.


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[Assistant] But, get this, Leslie simply bypassed Barrick and headed straight for the relatively undefended Newcastle upon Tyne, which no one had bothered to fortify because who needs to worry about the critical Newcastle coal supply?


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[Assistant] But it's not like Leslie making for Newcastle is that big of a deal.


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[Assistant] The only spot he can cross the river Tyne is at a bridge that is in fact pretty well defended. I mean sure there's a ford just a few miles up from Newcastle at Newburn, but it's not like he's going to, oh crap, he's crossing at Newburn.


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[Assistant] But, the fort at Newburn was something of a natural barrier, so the first push of Scottish cavalry was repulsed.


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[Assistant] He and his officers had mastered artillery while serving in the Continental Wars and knew what was what when it came to shelling the enemy.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, the raw English troop had probably never seen a cannon fired, let alone fired at them. So they did what comes natural when a cannon is fired at you, and they ran off as fast as they could.


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[Assistant] There were a few moments of valor for the English, for example a certain Colonel Monk, who will play a huge role at the end of our series,


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[Assistant] Kept his men together long enough to withdraw the English artillery pieces. But other than that, it was pretty much a rout.


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[Assistant] The Battle of Newburn was the first Scottish military victory on English soil since 1388.


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[Assistant] He was being undermined from within, by dissension in his own ranks.


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[Assistant] Specifically, dissension among the Puritan lords.


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[Assistant] Bedford, Warwick, Sey and Seal, the guys we met last week. They were still ticked off at the short parliament being cancelled.


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[Assistant] And had dug up a precedent from the Middle Ages that said if the king refused to call a parliament, that twelve peers of the realm could get together and call one on their own authority.


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[Assistant] So they drew up a statement pointing this out to Charles, signed by, yup, 12 peers of the realm. Their ultimatum was simple.


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[Assistant] Call another parliament, or we will call one under our own authority, which will precipitate a constitutional crisis and destroy any hope you have of winning this war.


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[Assistant] It looked like Charles was boxed in, until he pulled out an arcane medieval precedent of his own.


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[Assistant] Instead of calling a parliament, he could call a great council, that long dead precursor to parliament.


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[Assistant] Because Charle really, really, really didn't want to call another parliament.


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[Assistant] But of course, when that great council gathered in York in September 1640, they advised the king to, you guessed it, call a parliament.


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[Assistant] Well, first make a truce with a Scot, and then call a parliament.


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[Assistant] In October, unable to do a damn thing about the Scottish army occupying Northern England, the King and Covenanters agreed to the Treaty of Ripon.


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[Assistant] It stipulated that the king would pay for the Scottish occupation, calculated at £850 per day. The Scots, in return, would not plunder the countryside.


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[Assistant] To meet this demand, and as a precondition to every other demand the Scots might make, Charles had to immediately call a parliament.


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[Assistant] Next week, that parliament will indeed be summoned and hold its first session on November the 3rd, 1640.


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[Assistant] It would not be officially dissolved until March of 1660, which is why we call this parliament the Long Parliament.


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[Assistant] So this section was originally supposed to be a part of episode 5, Cavaliers and Roundheads, but it just kept growing, started to sidetrack the narrative, and had I let it go on like that, we never would have gotten anywhere. So I pulled it out and created this little standalone supplemental.


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[Assistant] If you're not super interested in the composition of the armies that are about to fight the English Civil Wars, then by all means, skip on ahead.


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[Assistant] When you get to the battles just imagine some guys with long spears, some other guys with muskets, some guys up on horseback, and a few cannons blasting away in the background, and you've pretty much got the gist of it. If you want something a little more detailed, then stick around. Still here? Okay, good.


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[Assistant] At the outset of the English Civil Wars, which are going to consume the remainder of the 1640s, England was the one major power in Europe that did not have a standing professional army.


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[Assistant] The only thing resembling a standing army were the so-called trained bands.


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[Assistant] The trained bands were local militia groups that met once a month or so to drill, or maybe didn't even meet that often because the local lords hadn't bothered to equip them.


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[Assistant] When the Civil War started though, the train band units were really the only thing that had any kind of military structure to it, so both sides tried to fold these local militia groups into their field armies.


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[Assistant] Except that there was one almost universal fact about the trained bands.


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[Assistant] They were not at all interested in leaving their home counties


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[Assistant] The whole point of the militia was to defend their homes. And you can't very well do that if you're marching me halfway to Scotland.


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[Assistant] Sometimes you could coax them out for a short campaign, but they got itchy feet pretty quickly and could turn mutinous in a hurry if you didn't let them go home. So relying on the train bans was no good.


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[Assistant] Which meant that both royalist and parliamentarians had to raise armies from scratch.


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[Assistant] Starting at the bottom, we have first of all, the infantry.


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[Assistant] These are the poor saps who got drafted into service, usually under pressure from their local lord. Maybe they were committed to the cause, whichever cause that happened to be.


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[Assistant] But given the number of soldiers who will just immediately switch sides upon being captured, I'm not sure ideological passion is really the motivating force for the average infantryman.


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[Assistant] The inventory was divided into two main groups, pikemen and musketeers.


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[Assistant] Pikemen were armed with pikes, musketeers were armed with muskets, or maybe that was obvious.


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[Assistant] These guys lined up to fight as a battalion, usually made up of 2-3 regiments, which were themselves made up of 10-15 companies.


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[Assistant] Theoretically, a company was supposed to be a hundred men, and ten companies were supposed to make up a regiment.


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[Assistant] But no one ever came close to this theoretical ideal, and the average company during the Civil War was more like 30 guys and a captain.


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[Assistant] Now what's weird is that at least at first a regiment was composed of both pikemen companies and musketeer companies, but in battle pikemen and musketeers were deployed separately.


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[Assistant] So as the soldiers lined up, each regiment was, at a minimum, immediately divided in half, and then sent off in different directions.


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[Assistant] It took everyone a while to realize how silly this was and align the logistical regiment with the tactical regiment, but they got there eventually.


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[Assistant] The pikemen were usually bunched at the center of the battle line and operated much like an old Greek phalanx.


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[Assistant] They would line up six deep carrying fifteen to eighteen foot pikes and march forward until they hit the line of enemy pikemen.


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[Assistant] They were all supposed to be outfitted with a metal breastplate, but they were usually issued only a leather buff coat, which you would think would make all of this a very messy and very stabby business, but in reality being run through with a pike was actually a pretty rare thing.


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[Assistant] The goal was simply to win the contest known as the Push of Pike, which is exactly what it sounds like. You were trying to shove, push, and knock off balance the other side until their ranks broke and ran off. Sometimes the Push of Pike was a hell of a contest.


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[Assistant] But often, one side or the other just wasn't that into it, and after a perfunctory showing would break and run.


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[Assistant] Then there were my favorite time when neither side was into it and they would just kind of stand there and wave their pikes around to make it look like they were fighting.


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[Assistant] Occasionally looking over their shoulders and hoping the generals way in the back were buying it.


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[Assistant] The Musketeers, meanwhile, would be deployed on the flanks, and their job was to blast the other side until they ran out of ammunition, and then charge in with swords, or, more often than not, simply the butt end of their muskets.


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[Assistant] The musketeers were usually outfitted with a matchlock rifle, which had the benefit of being both cheap and reliable.


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[Assistant] The downside of the matchlock was that the priming charge had to be lit by a slow burning match that every musketeer had to keep on hand and permanently lit.


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[Assistant] Not only did it take a little practice to get the timing right, but God help you if anything ever got wet.


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[Assistant] As the war went on, flintlock muskets started showing up, which didn't need the slow burning match, but they were more expensive and less reliable, so usually only went to sentries or scouts who needed to be ready to shoot at a moment's notice and couldn't just wander around with lit matches all the time.


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[Assistant] In battle, the musketeers were lined up six deep, like the pikemen, and each soldier could fire and reload about once every minute or so.


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[Assistant] So, they would just cycle through the ranks. You'd fire, go to the back, load your gun while slowly shuffling forward, and then firing again. This is where timing the light gets a little tricky.


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[Assistant] Sometimes, and this really becomes a royalist trademark because they were always having ammunition issues,


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[Assistant] You get three ranks to bunch together and fire all at once in a mass volley, and then charge in and fight it out with a sword, or the butt end of a musket.


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[Assistant] Theoretically, there were two types of cavalry, heavy cavalry and light cavalry. Heavy cavalry wears armor, which is heavy.


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[Assistant] But in the English Civil Wars, heavy cavalry is pretty much not a thing.


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[Assistant] Minimally armored and carrying pistols and swords.


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[Assistant] They were organized into troops, which is why cavalry men are often referred to as troopers, which had anywhere from 30 to 100 guys led by a captain, and a field regiment was ideally composed of six of these troops.


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[Assistant] Now, without any heavy cavalry around, battle tactics became confused, and this confusion is at the heart of why the royalist cavalry is going to keep kicking the crap out of the parliamentary cavalry at the beginning of the war.


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[Assistant] The traditional division of labor was for the heavy cavalry to lock knees and ride full speed into the enemy, trying to mow them over.


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[Assistant] And the light cavalry armed with guns covering the flanks of this steamroller.


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[Assistant] But when the heavy cavalry didn't show up for the English Civil War, the commanders on both sides had to adapt. Or not.


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[Assistant] The parliamentary commanders kept sending out their cavalry to fight the way they had always fought, right around with their guns trying to win a firefight.


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[Assistant] But when Prince Rupert, we'll get to him in episode 5, showed up in Charles' camp, he brought the latest continental military theories with him.


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[Assistant] Blasting into their parliamentary counterparts at full speed, waiting until the last possible moment to fire their pistols at point flank range.


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[Assistant] In the early campaigning, the royalist cavalry was basically invincible, because the parliamentary cavalry just wasn't prepared to deal with these kinds of shock tactics.


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[Assistant] In between the infantry and the cavalry, with a foot in each camp, were the dragoons. Dragoons were basically mounted infantry.


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[Assistant] But as the war progressed, they started being split up and deployed with cavalry units to provide ground cover for their permanently mounted comrades.


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[Assistant] Then, as the war kept going, the dragoons pretty much stopped dismounting altogether.


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[Assistant] Mostly because, as Stuart Reed points out in All the King's Armies, once you got on horseback, you really didn't want to get off again. Because you know who dies in battle? Infantrymen. You know who rides off and lives? Cavalrymen.


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[Assistant] So, I would just as soon stay on my horse, thank you very much.


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[Assistant] Artillery is not going to play a huge role in our story, because it was rarely decisive out in the field.


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[Assistant] And since I am not going to get sidetracked by the many and prolonged sieges of the war,


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[Assistant] Where artillery did play a major role, there is no need to dwell on it too much. But just so you know, there were three types.


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[Assistant] These were used to batter medieval castle walls, sometimes over the course of years.


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[Assistant] The various mobile armies, meanwhile, carried the other two types. Heavy field artillery and light field artillery.


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[Assistant] The heavy stuff, fired shot up to 20 pounds, would be positioned prior to the battle, and used to bombard the enemy before fighting commenced.


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[Assistant] The light artillery usually fired 4 to 6 pound shot, and could be moved around during the battle.


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[Assistant] The one major role artillery does play is how damn heavy it all was and how crappy all the roads were.


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[Assistant] Moving the pieces around took a lot of men, and a lot of horses, and a lot of carts, and it was slow going. A total drag on the rest of the army that limited everyone's mobility for not much value once the fighting got started.


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[Assistant] One field report noted that moving one 12 pound gun with 50 rounds and one brass mortar with 24 rounds required 67 horses and a whole host of gunners, fire workers, conductors, and workmen to keep everything running to say nothing of the sentries who had to guard it all.


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[Assistant] So hopefully, you now have a better idea of what everyone is doing once these battles get going.


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[Assistant] Pikemen will be jabbing away at each other trying to convince the generals that they're actually fighting.


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[Assistant] Musketeers will be lined up blasting away at each other until they run out of ammo, whereupon they will start hitting each other over the head with their guns.


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[Assistant] The royalist cavalry will be charging into the parliamentary cavalry, and then the parliamentary cavalry will be riding off in disarray.


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[Assistant] The Dragoons will be trying to convince their officers to let us stay on our horses, please. The artillery is stuck in a bog somewhere.


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[Assistant] If you want even more detail, I recommend The Civil Wars of England by John Kenyon, and All the King's Armies by Stuart Reed.


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[Assistant] Both of which focus exclusively on the military aspect of the war.


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[Assistant] Okay, so with that out of the way, let's get back to our regularly scheduled program.


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[Assistant] Last time, we left off with Charles' failed attempt to arrest the leaders of the parliamentary opposition.


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[Assistant] The attempt sparked an angry reaction from the parliamentary-inclined mobs of London, forcing Charles to flee the city in January 1642.


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[Assistant] This week, we are going to plunge into the chaotic mess that is the first English Civil War, and it really was a chaotic mess.


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[Assistant] Aside from a few intrepid adventurers who had privately volunteered for service on the continent,


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[Assistant] The generation that waged the English Civil Wars had no military experience to speak of and it will show. Caesar and Pompey, they were not.


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[Assistant] The early months of 1642 were tied up in an acrimonious exchange of letters between the king and parliament, full of unreasonable demands and barely concealed paranoia about the intentions of the other side.


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[Assistant] Then, the king made a tactical blunder by summoning the lords to attend to him personally.


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[Assistant] He was trying to shift the center of political gravity away from London.


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[Assistant] But of course, the only peers who responded were his allies.


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[Assistant] Which meant that the only resulting shift in political gravity occurred in the House of Lords, which now skewed decisively radical.


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[Assistant] As we discussed last week, the Irish Rebellion still loomed over all of this.


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[Assistant] But parliament was now firmly convinced that any army the king raised would be used against them first, and half of them actually believed that the rebellion had been orchestrated by Charles to justify raising an army to crush them.


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[Assistant] So in March, parliament unilaterally attempted to take control of the situation by passing the militia ordinance.


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[Assistant] The ordinance authorized parliament on its own authority to raise an army, pay for it, and appoint its commanders.


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[Assistant] Now you legal scholars out there might be thinking, hey, doesn't the king have to sign a bill before it can become a law? And the answer is, of course, he does.


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[Assistant] Which is why the militia ordinance was merely an ordinance and not the militia law. Because an ordinance does not require royal approval.


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[Assistant] And so yes, we are getting into pretty murky constitutional waters here, but desperate times do call for desperate measures.


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[Assistant] By mid-March, the King had moved up north to York, where he planned to regroup and launch his triumphant return to London.


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[Assistant] And though he didn't move on it right away, the key to this triumphant return would be controlling the arsenal in the northern port city of Hull.


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[Assistant] There were only a few of these major powder and weapons caches scattered across England, so making sure the whole arsenal was firmly in hand was pretty important.


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[Assistant] But the king was still affecting a conciliatory posture, so he didn't attempt to lock down Hall until mid-April.


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[Assistant] But when the king did make his move, the parliamentary leaders were tipped off that the king was leaving York, and so they ordered Sir John Hotham to ride north as fast as he could and lock the gates to the city.


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[Assistant] When the king arrived on April the 23rd, he discovered, much to his consternation, that the drawbridge was raised.


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[Assistant] This led to an absurd exchange where Hotham told the king he couldn't open the door without an order from the king, so the king ordered him to open the door, and Hotham said no, I mean an order from the sovereign authority of the king, which is ultimately vested in parliament.


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[Assistant] Flummoxed by this novel political theory that the king, and the king, were not necessarily the same thing, Charles was forced to withdraw.


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[Assistant] But all this public posturing was really about trying to win the propaganda war. So as Charles headed back to York, he was able to argue that he was an aggrieved victim.


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[Assistant] While parliament was able to argue that the king was trying to make war on his own people.


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[Assistant] The flurry of public letters and pamphlets and declarations reached its peak in early June, when Charles asked Parliament to send him a list of final demands, and Parliament responded by drawing up the 19 propositions.


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[Assistant] But the 19 propositions, which included things like approval of privy councillors, and the right to appoint tutors for the king's children to keep them from being brought up Catholic, were not the basis for negotiation.


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[Assistant] Because we're pretty much at the point now where both sides are trying to make sure the other side gets blamed when armed conflict inevitably breaks out.


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[Assistant] This is also the point when the so-called Constitutional Royalists in the House of Commons, the guys who had initially supported clipping the King's wings, but who had been alienated by things like the Grand Remonstrance and the proposals to radically reform the Church of England, started slipping out of London and physically joining the King's side.


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[Assistant] The king of course welcomed these defections, but unfortunately, as when he had summoned the lords, the withdrawal of the constitutional royalists only made the House of Commons a more extreme body.


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[Assistant] Further polarizing the political struggle and pushing a peaceful settlement off the table.


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[Assistant] With these two opposing sides coalescing, this makes for a nice opportunity to introduce the traditional names we use for each of them. Cavaliers and Roundheads.


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[Assistant] First, let's note that this is not what they call themselves. These were derogatory names supplied by the other side.


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[Assistant] The stereotypical royalist cavalier had long flowing hair, fancy clothes, a plumed hat, and a carefree aristocratic manner, which is to say a total disregard for commoners.


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[Assistant] He was also portrayed as a hard drinking frivolous atheist, a corrupt dilettante who hated God almost as much as he hated the poor.


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[Assistant] The stereotypical roundhead, meanwhile, was an upstanding Puritan defending the rights of freeborn Englishmen.


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[Assistant] Unless you talk to a royalist, in which case said roundhead is mocked for his ridiculously short-cropped hair, hence the name, his joyless Puritanism, and his unconscionable desire to undo the natural order of things and put the Kingdom of England in the hands of low-born religious fanatics.


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[Assistant] Both stereotypes only occasionally fit an extreme royalist on one side or an extreme puritan on the other, but the names have stuck and I might from time to time deploy them if I get sick of saying royalist or parliamentary.


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[Assistant] The drift to war picked up through June. When the King appointed a new Lord Admiral of the English Navy, Parliament countered by appointing the Earl of Warwick to the same post.


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[Assistant] Warwick, an old sea dog popular with the sailors, quickly secured their support, and just like that, the king had lost control of his own navy.


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[Assistant] Charles then issued something called the Commissions of Array.


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[Assistant] An old medieval statute that allowed the king to raise forces without the approval of parliament.


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[Assistant] Just as the militia ordinance was allowing parliament to raise forces without approval from the king.


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[Assistant] These contradictory declarations then circulated through the country, and everyone had to decide for themselves whether to follow the militia ordinance or the Commissions of Array, whether to become a roundhead or a cavalier.


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[Assistant] Both of these troop levies were legally dubious, but they were also being carried around by men with pikes and guns.


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[Assistant] In July, Parliament established a Committee of Safety, which formally resolved to raise the army it was already raising.


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[Assistant] The choice to lead this army, by unanimous acclamation, was Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex.


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[Assistant] Essex had long been alienated from the royal court. His father had been executed for launching a rather quixotic rebellion against an aging Queen Elizabeth in 1601,


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[Assistant] And then his first marriage had been annulled by King James in 1613 for the very public and very humiliating reason of impotence.


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[Assistant] He spent the 1620 serving as a volunteer in the Dutch armies, making him one of those few Englishmen with any military experience


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[Assistant] Which is one of the main reasons he was selected as Major General by Parliament in the first place.


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[Assistant] The other reason is that he was one of those hardline lords in the war at camp who had demanded Strafford's head no ifs, ands, or buts.


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[Assistant] So the parliamentary leadership could be assured that they were putting troops in the hands of a man who both knew how to fight and who was willing to fight.


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[Assistant] But on both counts, they would find themselves disappointed.


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[Assistant] Now, just so we don't forget about them, remember that as the militia ordinance and commissions of array are circulating the countryside, the English forces over in Ireland are still desperate for reinforcements.


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[Assistant] But the king and parliament have more or less forgotten why they had started caring about who gets to raise an army.


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[Assistant] They were now so completely locked in on each other that for the time being the Irish garrisons are just going to have to fend for themselves. Which, awesome. Thank you. Hey, did we mention the Catholic Old English have decided to make common cause with the Old Irish for the first time in history? Because they have. Okay, we'll just be here. Waiting. For reinforcements.


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[Assistant] On August 22, 1642, King Charles formally raised his banner at Nottingham.


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[Assistant] This was merely a symbolic act at this point, but it was the king's official declaration that he was at war with the enemies of England, and everybody needed to rally to his colors. Except that after he raised the banner, no one showed up. The turnout was pathetic. The commissions of Array were turning out to be a dismal failure.


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[Assistant] Parliament, meanwhile, was quickly putting together an army that numbered some fifteen thousand men by early September.


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[Assistant] So Charles had to quickly shift gears and start granting individual commissions, allowing lords to raise troops on their own authority,


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[Assistant] And thus follow old client patron lines rather than the impersonal commissions of Array.


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[Assistant] Duty to your local lord, after all, is easier to understand, and easier to enforce, than some abstract duty to a faraway king.


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[Assistant] Once he had enough troops though, Charles' plan was to march on London and retake the capital.


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[Assistant] On September 9th, the Earl of Essex marched out of London with his 15,000 men and went looking for the king.


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[Assistant] The first real action of the war took place on September the 23rd at Poick Bridge, where an advance guard of parliamentary cavalry met an advance guard of royalist cavalry, and in the ensuing skirmish the parliamentary force was quickly broken and driven off.


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[Assistant] It was a minor royalist victory, but it does present a nice opportunity to introduce Prince Rupert.


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[Assistant] Just 22 years old when the war broke out, he was the third son of Charles' older sister, Elizabeth.


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[Assistant] He had spent his life in exile along with the rest of his family after his father Frederick V had failed to gain the throne of Bohemia in 1620, basically starting the Thirty Years War.


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[Assistant] Living in Holland, Rupert embraced the military as a way of life, and went on his first campaign with the Dutch Prince of Orange at the age of 14.


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[Assistant] Five years later, he was captured by the Holy Roman Empire and held as a prisoner for three years, finally being released in late 1641, largely due to the diplomatic intervention of his uncle, King Charles.


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[Assistant] The grateful Rupert hopped over to England just in time to join the royalist side the night before Charles raised his standard in Nottingham.


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[Assistant] As we will see, Rupert was probably the most talented cavalry officer of the war, at least until Cromwell shows up.


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[Assistant] Usually on the side of good sense when it comes to big picture strategic decisions, but maddeningly undisciplined in the field, as we are about to see.


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[Assistant] On October 13th, the King finally felt like he had enough men to move on London.


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[Assistant] As he marched, he picked up further reinforcements, swelling his ranks to about 14,000 men, putting him basically on equal terms with the parliamentary army.


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[Assistant] As Charles moved southeast, Essex headed northwest to intercept him, but displaying the downright unprofessional soldiering that was the hallmark of the early fighting, neither side sent out advanced scouts, so neither side knew where the other side was until they were right on top of each other.


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[Assistant] And even then, when the two armies realize they were right on top of each other and so it's time to fight?


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[Assistant] Charles wound up lining up between Essex and London, even though Essex was supposed to be the one blocking the king's path back to the capital.


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[Assistant] Everyone's big assumption heading into the Battle of Edgehill is that this was going to be it.


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[Assistant] The two sides would have one big decisive battle and let the chips fall where they may. And it almost worked out that way. Except that Prince Rupert never came back.


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[Assistant] For a brief moment, it did look like Edge Hill was going to be decisive.


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[Assistant] As the two ranks of pikemen in the middle advanced on each other, Prince Rupert's cavalry barreled forward and broke the parliamentary horse.


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[Assistant] But as their beaten enemy fled in disarray, Rupert and his men, flush with the glory of the whole thing, chased after them.


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[Assistant] And kept chasing after them, and never came back.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, back at Edge Hill, the parliamentary infantry was steadily pushing the royalist infantry, until evening forced both sides to call off the fight.


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[Assistant] Had Rupert simply wheeled around and come charging into the rear of the parliamentary line, we probably wouldn't be talking about the First English Civil War right now. We'd be talking about the Battle of Edge Hill, and how it marked the end of an obscure parliamentary revolt in the 1640s.


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[Assistant] After the fighting, both sides were pretty well battered. The parliamentary army, even after being bolstered by a force led by John Hamden, was only half of what it had been the day before. And the king was no better off.


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[Assistant] Rupert offered to make a run for London with his triumphant cavalry, who had finally come back when the sun went down,


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[Assistant] But the king chose the more cautious strategy of keeping what remained of his army together, which meant that the march to London was painfully slow,


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[Assistant] Which of course meant that parliament had time to organize a defense.


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[Assistant] By the time the Royalist Army neared London on November 13th, a massive army of 24,000 stood at Turnham Green ready to stop them.


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[Assistant] Well, it wasn't really an army. It was more like a hastily raised mob of London apprentices backed up by the trained bands. But still, 24,000. That's enough to spook anyone.


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[Assistant] And it spooked Charles, so he withdrew his force to Oxford, where he planned to spend the winter.


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[Assistant] If you're thinking that the break in fighting brought on by winter would be a perfect time to negotiate a peace before things get any worse, you're both right and wrong.


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[Assistant] Parliamentary envoys did come to Oxford over the winter, and the two sides did start negotiating


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[Assistant] But it quickly became apparent that the recent fighting had only made everyone dig in even harder.


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[Assistant] Both sides made ridiculous demands because neither side was ready to concede a thing. This was going to be settled on the battlefield.


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[Assistant] Come the spring of 1643, the war really got going in earnest.


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[Assistant] So from here on out, we're not going to be talking about two armies dancing around each other, we're going to be talking about fighting in three separate but interconnected theatres.


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[Assistant] The Northern Theatre was defined by a rivalry between the royalist Earl of Newcastle and the parliamentary Lord Fairfax, and of course his son, Sir Thomas Fairfax.


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[Assistant] Sir Thomas Fairfax, you're going to want to write that down.


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[Assistant] In the middle, we'll have the on-again-off-again maneuvering between Charles and Essex, and in the quote-unquote West, we have a host of commanders duking it out, but, at least for now, the really interesting campaign pits the royalist Sir Ralph Hofton against his old friend and comrade-in-arms, Sir William Waller.


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[Assistant] There is no way I am going to cover every skirmish, battle, and siege of the first civil war, but we are going to hit the big stuff. I posted a map of all this to help keep things straight, so here we go.


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[Assistant] We'll start up in the north, where the Earl of Newcastle had been commissioned to lead the royalist forces.


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[Assistant] Newcastle was a rich and influential northern magnate who had actively supported Charles during the bishop's wars with men and money, and been rewarded with a seat on the Privy Council in 1639.


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[Assistant] As the Civil War got going, he had managed to raise an army of 8,000 men in short order.


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[Assistant] But perhaps even more important than that, he recruited some of the most capable officers to fight on either side of the war, including Continental veteran Sir George Goring and Sir Marmaduke Langdale.


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[Assistant] Newcastle was opposed by Ferdinando Fairfax, who had also fought for the king during the bishop's wars, but who had switched sides when the long parliament convened.


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[Assistant] During the summer of 1642, while Essex and Charles were dancing around each other down south, Newcastle and the Fairfaxes had signed a local neutrality agreement, obviously in the hopes that the war would be over before they had to fight each other.


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[Assistant] But come the spring of 1643, there was no putting off hostilities.


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[Assistant] Newcastle advanced on York and forced the small parliamentary army of three or four thousand to withdraw to Leeds.


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[Assistant] From there, the Fairfaxes were forced to move on to the city of Bradford.


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[Assistant] Knowing they would be unable to withstand a siege, father and son launched a daring surprise attack on Newcastle's army of now 10,000 men at Ed Walton Moore on June 30th.


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[Assistant] They nearly pulled the rabbit out of their hat, but the royalists regroup and turn the parliamentary flank, forcing the Fairfaxes to fall back to Hull, ceding the royalist control of all Yorkshire.


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[Assistant] So basically, it was a terrible opening round for parliament in the north.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, down in the west, the war started no better for parliament.


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[Assistant] As I just mentioned, there were a couple of different forces running around, but the key armies were led by William Waller and Ralph Hopton.


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[Assistant] Waller was a staunch parliamentarian despite not having any sympathy for radical puritans.


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[Assistant] He had fought at Edge Hill, but had been among the cavalry scattered by Rupert at the outside of the battle.


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[Assistant] Hopden, meanwhile, had joined the royalist cause despite supporting the impeachment of Stratford and being a member of the delegation that had formally presented the Grand Remonstrance to Charles in December 1641.


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[Assistant] Waller and Hopton had also served together on the continent, as volunteers in the lifeguard of Elizabeth of Bohemia.


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[Assistant] AKA, King Charles' older sister, and Prince Rupert's mother.


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[Assistant] They were friends, they were neighbors, but now they found themselves on opposite sides in a civil war they both clearly had mixed feelings about.


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[Assistant] In fact, after they had spent some time fighting and skirmishing around each other in early 1643, Hoppton sent Waller a letter asking if there wasn't some way for them to just settle things and take no further part in the war.


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[Assistant] The great God who is the searcher of my heart knows with what a sad sense I go upon this service and with what a perfect hatred I detest this war without an enemy.


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[Assistant] But I look upon it as sent from God, and that is enough to silence all passion in me.


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[Assistant] We are both upon the stage and must act such parts as are assigned us in this tragedy.


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[Assistant] Let us do it in a way of honor and without personal animosities.


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[Assistant] After barely winning a difficult fight at Lansdown Hill on July 5th, Hopden was badly injured when a powder keg exploded as his army was preparing to withdraw the next morning.


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[Assistant] But a blind and half-paralyzed Hopton ordered his cavalry to break for the King at Oxford and beg for reinforcements, and they managed to slip away before Waller could completely seal his lines.


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[Assistant] Amazingly, the king responded quickly. An overnight 1,800 horse were riding out of Oxford.


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[Assistant] Waller's army numbered 2,500 foot and about 2,000 horse, but with the arrival of the royalist reinforcements, he found himself pressed between Hopkins besieged 2,000 infantrymen on one side and the 1,800 cavalry troopers on the other.


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[Assistant] So he pulled his forces up to a defensive position at round way down on July 13th.


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[Assistant] But the Royalist cavalry, who had been riding all night, basically just kept right on riding until they hit Waller's army.


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[Assistant] After intense fighting, the parliamentary cavalry was scattered.


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[Assistant] But they accidentally retreated over a concealed cliff.


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[Assistant] Meanwhile, Hopkins Royalist Infantry, who had been slow to mobilize because they had not expected help to come so quickly, finally got moving,


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[Assistant] And Waller's infantry was helpless now before the oncoming pincer.


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[Assistant] A few died where they stood, most surrendered, and a bunch more ran off.


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[Assistant] Waller managed to get away, but his army, the parliamentary army in the west, was destroyed.


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[Assistant] So by midsummer 1643, royalists control the north and the west. And then, just to compound things, Prince Rupert rode off and seized the supposedly impregnable city of Bristol on July 26th, after convincing the parliamentary garrison commander to surrender without a fight.


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[Assistant] So as the autumn of 1643 approached, parliament was in it in a bad way.


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[Assistant] But all was not lost. Parliament still had money to draw on from the London merchants, and fertile recruiting grounds in the eastern counties, where royalists dared not tread.


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[Assistant] Indeed, when Waller made it back to London in early August, he was greeted as a hero despite the thrashing at Round Way Down.


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[Assistant] And parliament immediately voted to raise him an army of 11,000 that he could use to defend London.


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[Assistant] A commission to raise 20,000 men to form a new Eastern Association army.


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[Assistant] With everything going so well for the Royalists, though, Charles decided to once again shoot himself in the foot when he made the inexplicable decision to besiege Gloucester in late July.


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[Assistant] Had Charles consolidated his forces in the middle and west, it is likely he could have ended the war before parliament could regroup.


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[Assistant] But instead he bogged himself down, pointlessly besieging a strategically unnecessary city.


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[Assistant] Before the king came to his senses, Essex took off with an army that once again numbered about 15,000 to lift the siege.


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[Assistant] They ran Charles out of Gloucester on September 4, but then, like the year before, the two armies just sort of wandered around until they bumped into each other at Newbury two weeks later. Once again, the king wound up standing between Essex and London.


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[Assistant] As with Edgehill, everyone hoped that the First Battle of Newbery would be decisive enough to end the war. That we call it the First Battle of Newbery should tell you everything you need to know about that.


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[Assistant] On the morning of September 20th, the two sides lined up on a north-south axis.


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[Assistant] The north end was bounded by a river, the south end by a flat area called the Wash Common,


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[Assistant] In the middle was a mess of hedgerows and rough terrain surrounded by a high point called Round Hill, which the royalists, despite having arrived first, just didn't occupy for some reason, allowing the parliamentary forces to waltz in and take it.


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[Assistant] When the battle started, the North had generated into a bloody stalemate.


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[Assistant] The middle turned into a vicious fight over Round Hill when the Royalists suddenly realized, oh yeah, we need that.


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[Assistant] Nassau saw a fierce back and forth between Prince Rupert's horse and a this time not totally overmatched parliamentary cavalry.


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[Assistant] The south end of the fight then turned into a wicked artillery duel that saw the London train bands, who were supposed to be the weak link of Essex's army,


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[Assistant] For some reason decide to hold their ground in the face of alternating artillery bombardments and cavalry attacks.


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[Assistant] When night fell, Newbury turned out to have been just as bloody and just as indecisive as Edgehill had been.


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[Assistant] Both sides were preparing to get back to it the next day, but Charles decided to withdraw after taking stock of his gunpowder stores and realizing he didn't have any more.


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[Assistant] With the civil war approaching its second winter, the parliamentary cause was reeling,


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[Assistant] But the moderately positive end to the first battle of Nuburi gave them a shred of hope that they could still pull this thing off. But they would not be able to do it without help.


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[Assistant] Next week, it will be time to call the Scots back onto the field of play.


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[Assistant] It will also be time to officially meet a man who has been skulking around on the sidelines since the parliament of 1628, but who has until now been neither important enough nor influential enough to merit a second glance.


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[Assistant] A man who was about to command the intention, not just of his fellow Englishmen, but of the entire world. Oliver Cromwell.


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[Assistant] So last time, we blazed through a lot of necessary background and followed King Charles through the first four years of his reign, culminating with his decision in March 1629 to dissolve parliament and then, so help me God, never call another one.


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[Assistant] If Charles wanted to rule without parliament, that was fine. But he was going to have to figure out a way to fund his administration without levying any taxes.


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[Assistant] This week, we are going to explore some of the admittedly creative, but ultimately self-defeating ways Charles raised money without having to raise a parliament.


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[Assistant] We're also gonna grapple with the other big question that loomed over the era of personal rule. What will the religion of Britain be?


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[Assistant] These two threads, finance and religion, will both come to a head in 1637, at which point events start sloping dramatically downhill toward revolt, civil war, and revolution.


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[Assistant] The first thing Charles did after closing up shop on parliament was close up shop on the wars he and Buckingham had pursued in the first years of his reign.


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[Assistant] As I said last week, the main reason a monarch needs parliament is to fund their wars. So as long as the monarch avoids war, he has a shot at avoiding parliament.


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[Assistant] So King Charles worked out a treaty with France in April 1629 and then concluded peace with Spain in November 1630.


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[Assistant] The trick, of course, would be staying out of future wars, which was not impossible, but with the Thirty Years War raging on the continent, it was not necessarily probable.


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[Assistant] The funny thing, though, is that while Charles managed to avoid getting dragged into the Thirty Years War, he wound up needlessly picking a fight with the Scots in 1637, which is what we're gonna get into next week.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With parliament out of the picture, Charles governed his domains through a semi-formal group of counselors.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of them sat on the more formal preview council, the standing body of peers who advised the king,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But other councillors were men of lower rank who simply held positions within the royal household that put them in close proximity to Charles on a daily basis.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of these advisors were dependable administrators, some flaky courtiers, but two men were by far the most talented in terms of intelligence, drive, and ambition.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He sat in the first of Charles' parliaments, but famously distinguished himself as an outspoken member of the opposition.