Ten years later than the expedition of the Pilgrim Fathers, that is to say, in 1630, there was a further large emigration of Puritans from Old England into New England. Under Charles I. who had succeeded James, and tried to pursue the same policy of governing and extorting money without a Parliament, the strained feeling between the Crown and the people grew more intense. They formed themselves into distinct parties—Royalists or Cavaliers on the outside, and Puritans on the other.
The smouldering hostility broke into open war. In the first battles the Royalists had the advantage. The Puritan armies were raw and badly organised. But in their ranks were men of ability and of stern purpose. Under the orders of Oliver Cromwell as their commander-in-chief a rigid discipline was imposed. They went into battle singing hymns, inspired by an intense conviction that they were fighting in the service of the Lord. It was a union of discipline with zeal which the light-hearted and light-headed Cavaliers could not match.
The Royalists wore gallant and gay attire and flowing curls, and culled all the joys of life. The Puritans dressed themselves in sombre colours, set their faces into solemn lines and regarded even innocent mirth and amusement as a sin. The earnestness which marked all their behaviour they brought to the business of fighting.
After the fortunes of the war had gone variously in several campaigns, the Royalists suffered what really was a decisive defeat in the battle of Naseby in 1645. Their cause never recovered from it.
There was quartered in the north of England at this time a Scottish army. Charles had endeavoured to impose on the Church of Scotland the form of Protestantism which was the State religion in England. But the majority of the Scottish people professed a religion much more nearly akin to that of the English Puritans. They bound themselves by a Covenant (whence its adherents were called Covenanters) to oppose by all means in their power the priests and the bishops whom the Scottish king of the United Kingdom tried to force on them. They took arms and made their way victoriously south until they were bribed to stop and to establish themselves in quarters in the north of England by part payment and part promise of payment of a yearly sum. And to the protection of that army Charles fled, as his fortunes grew more and more desperate, after the defeat at Naseby in 1646. The payments promised to the Scots were much in arrears. After long negotiations they gave up their king into the hands of the English Puritans in exchange for a large sum of money to quit the debt. Once the king escaped, but was recaptured, and in 1649, after a trial in which the verdict was certain from the first, was executed on the block.
The king being dead, the Parliament declared the country a Commonwealth, under Oliver Cromwell, who had the title of Protector. The Protector's powers were not strictly defined, and perhaps there was no real limit to them, seeing that he had the army, which was all-powerful, ready to do his bidding. And this was a power which he had proved that he would not hesitate to use. He was a man typical of the Puritan spirit—absolutely convinced of the justice of his cause and determined to make it prevail no matter at what cost of suffering to himself, to his friends, or to his enemies—a very terrible man, whose value, in those distracted times, was that he not only made himself a terror to his enemies at home, but also made England feared and respected abroad as she had not been under the weak Stuart kings.
So now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, we may at length truly say that Europe had passed through that most miserable period of wars about religion which accompanied and followed the Reformation. We have to look on those religious wars as one of the two great features in our story during that half-century. The other principal feature is the continual expansion of the white Europeans into countries which had been in the possession of men of colour.
England had sent a few ships, which effected little, to help the Huguenots in their fight with the French Crown, and we catch a far-off echo of that hostility in the fighting which took place between English and French over the French settlements in the St. Lawrence. The French were defeated, but for the time being they were allowed to remain in possession of their Canadian settlements.