As sectarian conflicts consume the Middle East and Africa, there is just one grim and hard-to-read reminder as you stroll down the High Street of the death and devastation Marlborough suffered during our own Civil War.
High up against the brick wall of the Castle and Ball hotel is a fading blue-painted plaque unveiled in a wreath-laying ceremony by the town’s elegant then Mayor, Edwina Fogg, on December 5, 2012.
And under Marlborough’s coat of arms, it declares: Battle of Marlborough, 5th December, 1642, and adds: “Near this place a Royalist army fought their way into the town and defeated the Parliamentary garrison.”
That tells nothing of the pillaging that took place after a three-day siege when the Royalist army of 7,000 soldiers and cavalry stormed the barricades and ransacked the town, more than 60 properties being put to the torch and 120 prisoners, the Mayor and MP among them, marched off to prison in Oxford.
Echoes of that horrendous event appear in Professor Peter Gaunt’s new military history of The English Civil War, in which he records how Marlborough’s radical supporters of Cromwell kept the Royalists at bay during November and early December with “withering musket fire”.
A bitter battle in fact that will be re-enacted next month on The Common with cannon, pikes and guns galore by hordes from the English Civil War Society.
And he draws remarkable striking parallels with war in the 17th century and challenging conflagrations taking place today.
Marlborough was a strategic location because of its Bath Road connection to the West and was so close to Oxford, where King Charles had made his base.
“However, a combined force of up to 7,000 royalist infantry and cavalry eventually overwhelmed the defenders and took the town on 5 December, reportedly ‘cutting and slashing’ all they encountered as they entered, and then unleashing an orgy of violence, plunder and destruction,” Professor Gaunt writes.
And they even mistreated “the townspeople as well as the 140-strong parliamentarian garrison, taunting them as ‘round-head rogues and round-head whores, you take up arms against your King, you rogues, you deserve to be hanged, every man to be killed, both man, woman and child, and your town burnt to ashes’.”
And he adds: “This highly emotive account, which explicitly likened the behaviour of the Royalists who took Marlborough to that of the Irish Catholic rebels, claimed that over £50,000 in cash, goods and wares was taken by the King’s men.”
But given today’s global battles, the fascination for many will be the amazing similarities with wars today that brought about the Civil War in the first place.
Rising debt, over-taxation, austerity, mis-rule were the key elements in the sad saga and the failure of Cromwell’s rebellious mission was brought about by the emergence of alternative political sects and factions, just like UKIP, as well as the collapse of the Church of England.
There were the Levellers, the Diggers pressing for democratic change, Quakers, Presbyterians, Baptists and non-conformist Fifth Monarchists demanding religious freedom and while a fragile peace was held by the New Model Army – as in other countries today – violence broke out again.
“All these divisions encouraged the King to play divide and rule and to hold back from reaching a settlement,” points out Professor Gaunt, who shows that the death rate, with the exception of World War I, was higher than any bother war the British have been involved in.
And the end result of all the complex confusion was….the return of an imported monarchy, which has helped glue together the English, the Scots, Welsh and Irish into a united kingdom, now again under threat.
One sign of much debated Britishness as a model for good disagreement is to be seen in Parliament Square – a statue of Cromwell outside the Palace of Westminister while opposite stands the statue of Winston Churchill, both true defenders of freedom.
The English Civil War : A Military History is published by I.B.Tauris at £19.99.
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