Citation

Kelsey S. History 2007; 92(308): 428-448.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1468-229X.2007.00406.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

From their outset, the prince of Wales played a politically and symbolically significant part in the English civil wars. But from mid-1646, with Charles I in the hands of his enemies, primary responsibility for the military and diplomatic aspirations of the House of Stuart devolved almost entirely upon the king's eldest son. Indeed, this essential fact was central to the king's own strategic thinking because he had persuaded himself that his opponents must seek an accommodation with him as long as his successor was at large. The threat posed by the prince became violent reality in 1648 when he commissioned a string of mutinies and rebellions across England and Wales and briefly reasserted royal dominion of the seas. Although his martial and maritime escapades came to nothing, they nevertheless gave the prince his first opportunity to wield the instruments of sovereign power in the exercise of an authority independent of his father's. The second civil war also sharpened the contrast between the prince's freedom of action and the king's hapless captivity. The fortunes of the Stuart monarchy had hit rock bottom, but in the eyes of at least some royalists, an obvious solution had also begun to suggest itself.