Blakemore, Richard J. and Elaine Murphy. The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2018.
The civil wars fought in the British Isles during the seventeenth century have been extensively studied and analyzed by historians over the centuries, but it is the significance of the waters and seas surrounding those islands, and what happened there, that is the focus of Richard J. Blakemore and Elaine Murphy’s The British Civil Wars at Sea, 1638-1653. Blakemore and Murphy produced this work upon the realization that the historiography of the civil wars has left a gap by its lack of examination of maritime and naval events, and that those events add crucial context to the understanding of the civil wars themselves, and to Britain’s post-civil war history. Both authors are well-suited to this subject; Blakemore is at the University of Reading and focuses his research on British seafarers in the early modern period, and Murphy is an Associate Professor at the University of Plymouth, focusing on British naval history. Both have written extensively on the maritime history of Britain, and this collaboration received multiple scholarly accolades after its publishing. The skills of both Blakemore and Murphy are on display in their impressive use of primary sources for the book. They build their work with documents from the National and Parliamentary Archives, including documents from the High Court of Admiralty and the Calendar of State Papers. They also use a large number of printed manuscripts and London propaganda newsbooks like Mercurius Aulicus and the Moderate Intelligencer. The goal of The British Civil Wars at Sea is to demonstrate how the British navy progressed from being a feeble fleet in 1638 to a dominant naval power by 1653, and how naval actions were critical factors in the outcome of the civil wars.
Blakemore and Murphy structure the general arc of the book to present a roughly chronological narrative of naval events during the civil wars. With a general build-up of European naval strength in the seventeenth century, due to growing maritime enterprise and threats posed by privateering and piracy, Charles I instituted a very unpopular tax for the benefit of the navy, which was just one of the many causes that led to the outbreak of war. Charles faced rebellions in Scotland and Ireland, and at home, a defiant parliament that had taken control of the navy. Over the next several years, naval success went back and forth between royalist and parliamentarian forces, with most maritime action coming through siege blockades and strategic movement of supplies and reinforcements rather than head-on ship battles. After the parliamentarian victory in 1646 there was growing dissatisfaction and disunity within the navy, which led to a major mutiny in the Downs in 1648 led by seafarers who wished to treat with the king and to the renewal of naval conflict between royalists and parliamentarians. It is possible that Charles I and his forces had a small window of opportunity for victory during this time, but in the end, any advantages essentially backfired and Charles was defeated once again. The conflict continued for several more years, with Charles II and his royalist forces eventually losing out.
The authors couple their overview of the wars with the argument that naval events were crucial factors to the course and eventual outcome of the wars, a perspective they contend is missing from much of the historiography. To begin with, the fact that parliament gained control of the navy in 1642 was a colossal advantage and the authors argue this was a contributing factor to parliament’s victory. Control of the navy allowed the parliamentarians to defend London, support the land war throughout the islands, and control maritime trade and security. A few ships remained loyal to the king, and both sides were forced to hire private merchantmen to fight, but in a conflict where the number of existing ships was finite, the advantage fell on the parliamentarian side. While the royalists made a determined effort, the authors write that “in the long run they lacked the capabilities to pose a serious threat to parliamentarian domination of the seas” (128).
The initial maritime advantage that the parliamentarians benefitted from seemed to grow more commanding as the wars went on. The authors show that this was due to effective infrastructure and organization. Parliament added newly-built warships to its fleet, while also hiring many private ships to act as an auxiliary force, and the admiralty was run by effective leaders. Over time, this led to increasing control of the seas around Britain, which gave parliament a certain amount of control of shipping and trade routes, and provided security from foreign invasion. For parliament, this only aided the ability to support the land war, while the abilities of the royalist navy slowly shrank. This development is most evident in the later stage of the wars, after the execution of Charles I, as the new Commonwealth felt beset by enemies, and the authors cite N.A.M. Rodgers’ comment that it was “the fear and insecurity of a military dictatorship surrounded by enemies real and imagined which made England a first class naval power” (154). The fears and pressures of war encouraged the investment in naval power and increasingly paid off in real advantages. This can be seen in the Commonwealth’s gradual overwhelming of the royalist navy in the 1650s, as Prince Rupert’s fleet was increasingly ineffectual and seemed to be merely avoiding capture, rather than contributing to the war effort in any meaningful way. The necessities of war were the impetus of the build-up of the parliamentarian navy, and the authors conclude that by 1653 the British navy was “the pre-eminent naval force in Europe, and a key pillar of the Commonwealth” (174). This mastery of the seas poised Britain for its imperial future across the globe.
The British Civil Wars at Sea is a strong and well-researched military history that is clearly intended for serious scholars of the conflicts in Britain during this time period. It provides a focused examination of one piece of the larger puzzle of the civil wars; a reader will not come away with an understanding of the wider events of the civil wars from this book alone, but it would contribute to a fuller understanding in combination with other scholarship on the subject of the wars. The one point on which Blakemore and Murphy could be criticized is that after writing a compelling work on the importance of the naval element in the civil wars, they seem to somewhat downplay their conclusion. While stressing the significance of the maritime conflict, they also admit that it was land battles that ultimately decided the outcome of the wars. While their effort to avoid hyperbole or unmerited overemphasis of naval events is appropriate, it does feel a bit undermining to the central arguments of the book.
Reviewed by Matthew Inman, George Mason University
