Wars of The Three Kingdoms

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms formed an intertwined series of conflicts that took place in England, Ireland, and Scotland between 1639 and 1651 after these three countries had come under the "Personal Rule" of the same monarch. The English Civil War has become the best-known of these conflicts and included the execution of the Three Kingdoms' monarch, Charles I, by the English parliament in 1649. The term, Wars of the Three Kingdoms, is often extended to include the uprisings and conflicts that continued through the 1650s until The English Restoration of the monarchy with Charles II, in 1660 (from which point the Three Kingdoms were once again under a relatively peaceful personal union led by a Stuart monarch), and sometimes until Venner's Uprising the following year. The wars were the outcome of tensions between king and subjects over religious and civil issues. Religious disputes centred on whether religion was to be dictated by the monarch or the choice of the subject, the subjects often feeling that they ought to have a direct relationship with God unmediated by any monarch or human intermediary. The related civil questions were to what extent the king's rule was constrained by parliaments — in particular his right to raise taxes and armed forces without consent. Furthermore, the wars also had an element of national conflict, as Ireland and Scotland rebelled against England's primacy within the Three Kingdoms. The victory of the English Parliament — ultimately under Oliver Cromwell — over the King, the Irish and the Scots helped to determine the future of Great Britain as a constitutional monarchy with political power centred on London. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms also paralleled a number of similar conflicts at the same time in Europe — such as the Fronde in France and the rebellions of the Netherlands and Portugal against Spanish rule.

The Wars included the Bishops' Wars of 1639 and 1640, the Scottish Civil War of 1644–45; the Irish Rebellion of 1641, Confederate Ireland, 1642–49 and the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland in 1649 (collectively the Eleven years war or Irish Confederate Wars); and the First, Second and Third English Civil Wars of 1642–46, 1648–49 and 1650–51.

Although the term is not new and was already used by James Heath in his book A Brief Chronicle of all the Chief Actions so fatally Falling out in the three Kingdoms, first published in 1662, recent publications' tendency to name these linked conflicts the Wars of the Three Kingdoms represents a trend by recent historians aiming to take a unified overview rather than treating some of the conflicts as mere background to the English Civil War. Some, such as Carlton, Gaunt and Royal have labelled them the British Civil Wars, but this can be misleading, because although the three realms were linked by a personal union, the three kingdoms did not become a single political entity until the Act of Union 1800.