by Smith, Skye
First try "bcw-project.org", the robust and well organized British Civil War website.
If you can't find it at BCW then do a keyword search on Google. If a relevant BCW or Wikipedia article is listed, then other articles in the list will also be relevant. If not, then add more keywords and search again.
2. How can I tell which characters are historic and which are fictional?
As a rule of thumb, if the character is a Parliamentarian, has a title, or a military rank of captain or above, then they are historic and so are their families. If the character is a member of the Wellenhay clan, or goes unnamed, they are fictional.
3. What was a Pistoleer? (for more info see the Appendix of Book One)
Pistoleers were mounted infantry. They rode lighter, cheaper horses, wore only enough armour to protect chest and back, and were more likely to carry a multipurpose axe than a cavalry sabre. Their main weapons were pistols, not lances, although many also carried a carbine ... a short musket. They evolved in the Protestant Dutch army because that army was short on cavalry.
During a large battle they were often kept back as a strategic reserve, but before the battle they would be used as couriers, scouts, and skirmishers. The weakness of the Pistoleers was that normal pistols were single shot, and reloading them on a moving horse was slow work. For this reason pistoleers carried more than one gun, and one of them would be a Dragon. A Dragon was a blunderbuss pistol ... a scatter gun, the sawed-off shotgun of the era. During the British Civil war companies of Pistoleers were called 'flying squads'.
4. What was a Lateen?
A Lateen is an ancient sailing rig that was so efficient that it is still in use today. It is a triangular sail very much like the jib sail you see on the front of a modern sailboat and it works in much the same way. One difference is that it is hung from a diagonal pole (spar) rather than from a diagonal wire. The spar allowed the mast to be shorter and closer to the front of the boat because the sail gained its full height due to the length of the spar.
It was likely an Egyptian invention for it is the perfect rig for sailing up the Nile, however it was also used by the Phoenicians (and therefore the Carthaginians) and the Greeks. It was a gift to explorers because it allowed them to sail at an acute angle to the wind, thus it was used by the Arabs and the Portuguese on their voyages of discovery. It was far more common on the Mediterranean than in the Atlantic. Atlantic ships rarely had a lateen as a main sail, but would often have one on a small rearmost mast to aid in steering the ship. Modern sailing yachts rarely use a lateen rig, and instead have a tall mast with a triangle sail in front of the mast and another behind it (a Bermudan rig).
A lateen was a far more versatile sail than the alternatives of the era, the square sail. It could be used at most angles to the wind and most of the time it could be controlled from the deck. The weakness of the rig was when the wind came from the other direction, or when you turned to be on the other side of the wind (tacked). To sail efficiently at an angle to the wind, the spar had to be on the other side of the mast from the wind. To change which side the spar was on was a nasty chore. On some boats you had to physically lift the spar over the mast.
5. What was Dragon's Breath?
A dragon was the pistol version of a blunderbuss (from the Dutch donderbuis - thunder pipe). It was a short range, large caliber gun designed to fire multiple shot rather than a single ball - so the sawed-off shotgun of the era. Early barrels were of brass, so they were not loaded with debris such as nails for that would soon ruin the barrel. The muzzle was flared, not so much to spread the shot, but to make it easier to load the loose shot.
Dragon's Breath occurred when a Dragon was loaded with chemicals that would create a cloud of noxious smoke. The smoke was designed to temporarily (or permanently) blind men and horses, or to otherwise obscure the shooter from sight. It could be used as part of an attack or part of a retreat. Think of it as an early version of tear gas.
6. Why was a wheel lock pistol so special?
Wheel locks first appeared about the same time as the earliest 'hammer' locks, and were a technical breakthrough, courtesy of clockmakers. Rather than having a flint on a moving lever hitting a fixed steel, they had a fixed flint ground by a rotating steel wheel. Although they solved the 'bad weather' deficiencies of the matchlocks, they were complex and expensive to make. Despite this and the continuous evolution of the 'hammer' locks, they were slow to die out because they were prized by gentlemen.
Due to the internal clockworks, wheel lock pistols could be made small and were easily concealed in clothing. They were the first choice of assassins because they could be made without jagged edges that could snag threads when drawn quickly out of a pocket. In 1580, the protestant leader of Holland, William the Silent, became the first politician to be assassinated using a pistol ... a wheellock pistol loaded with three balls.
7. Who were the Covenanters?
The Covenanters were Scottish Presbyterians who rebelled against King Charles' plan of modeling the Church of Scotland after the Church of England. Charles wanted to centralize church power under his appointed bishops and reintroduce papist-style liturgies and prayer books. They drew up a convoluted document called the Covenant which pointed out all of their complaints with the king's plan and his laws and then used it as a petition to gather the signatures of Scots.
8. What caused the Second Bishop's war?
The First Bishop's War was won by the Scottish Presbyterian Covenanters because the English army decided not to fight after they realized that the Covenanter army was led by Alexander Leslie and included squads of battled-hardened veterans of the Thirty Years' War. Leslie had worked his way up to the rank of Field Marshal in the very successful Swedish army. The war ended with the Berwick treaty. This embarrassing setback taught King Charles two things: that his best general was Lord Strafford, his Deputy who governed Ireland, and that wars were expensive.
Five months later in the Battle of the Downs the Dutch navy humbled the Spanish navy, but Charles made some critical diplomatic blunders. As a result, he was cut off from funding from the Spanish and from funding from the English Parliament, and the ever more powerful Dutch became more friendly to the cause of the Scottish Covenanters.
During the peace of the Berwick treaty, Charles attempted to curb the Covenanters by plotting and stealth terror. For this he used his Stuart allies in Scotland and Ireland, and kept Strafford's Ireland based army in England. His plan was to 'arrest' the Covenanter leaders individually, imprison those who were not killed while escaping and once that was done, send Strafford's army to Edinburgh to seize the Parliament.
Just as this politicide began, someone blew the whistle on the plot. In reaction, General Leslie marched his army south and unopposed all the way to the River Tyne. The Northumbrians allowed him to pass because the Edinburgh parliament had given him funds enough to pay for all the supplies his army needed. This was very different from the king's army whose foragers stole everything they needed. Leslie defeated the English army at the Battle of Newburn.
There were two main reasons that Leslie marched to the Tyne and no further. He did not want to fight a huge battle where Scottish farmers would bear the brunt of the cost. His strategy was to shut down the coal industry. Southern England and London were dependant on coal, and the king was dependant on his share of the profits reaped by the Lords of Coal.
9. Who were the Lords of Coal?
By 1640 the coal industry of Britain was controlled by the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle. This was an incorporated cartel that off and on had the king's patent in the domestic and international trade in coal. Officially the king was paid a shilling per cartload, but the Oligarchs of Coal would loan him vast amounts in order to keep their monopoly intact.
The Cavendish, Selby, Anderson, Riddel, Liddell, Marley, and Cole families were the most political of the Oligarchs and rotated themselves through the positions of MP, Mayor, and Sheriff of Newcastle.
10. What was a patent?
King Charles used patents, or rather the instant monopolies they created, as a cash cow. An example was the patent on the trade in coal that he granted the Company of Hostmen of Newcastle. Of course, he got kickbacks from the monopoly profits. Charles was never held accountable for his abuse of patents because he controlled the court of appeals. In 1624 a patent could be issued for no longer than 14 years. Today 20 years is more common and much shorter than the term of a copyright.
11. Who were the members of the Reform Party?
The party of reform was not a formal political party as we know today. It was a circle of like-minded parliamentarians that worked together which at the time was usually referred to as Pym's Junto. It included the Five Members of the Commons that Charles tried to arrest for treason namely John Pym, John Hampden, Denzil Holles, Arthur Haselrig and William Strode, plus Oliver St John, Nathaniel Fiennes, John Clotworthy, Harbottle Grimston and Walter Earle.
In the House of Lords it had the support of Robert Rich (Earl of Warwick), William Fiennes (Viscount Saye and Sele), Robert Greville (Baron Brooke), William Russell (Earl of Bedford), Robert Devereux (Earl of Essex), George Digby (Earl of Bristol and a mole for the king), and Edward Montagu (Earl of Manchester).
Of note is that most of these men, MP's and lords alike were imprisoned at one time or another by the king. Some of the lords were part of an earlier politically active group called the Broughton Castle Circle. It was that group which had financially supported Hampden in his long legal battle against the Ship Money tax. The Circle coincided with the directorships of a few joint venture companies such as the Providence Company (which colonized Warwick's privateer island of Providence near Panama).
Pym had been Warwick's bookkeeper and was the orator of the party, while Hampden was the brain and Warwick the money. The hick backbencher Oliver Cromwell became involved with the party because Hampden was his cousin.
12. What caused the riots in London?
In the lead up to the Civil War there were as many causes for riots as there were riots. The foundation of the riots was that under the Stuart regime London had become a poverty trap for rural workers who flocked to the city on rumours of well-paid work. They were not to know that pay was high by rural standards but not for living in an expensive and cash-based city. It was an era when the rich were getting richer and the poor were getting poorer because the prices of basic food, shelter, heat and clothing was ever rising.
The landlord ruling elite had perfected the tactic of creating artificial shortages to boost prices and they were using the tactic by slum-lording, leaving fields fallow, and jacking the price of fuel (coal) with rumours of shortages to come. Since the greatest profits were from monopolies, the king granted patents to his inner circle of supporters and funded his own lavish lifestyle from the kickbacks.
To the king and his elite, the underlying causes of the riots were what were keeping them wealthy, so they didn't care. What worried them was not the occasional riot, but that the mobs were becoming organized, timed, and targeted. This was being done by orator Pym and his well-educated party of Reform through mass printed leaflets, pamphlets and posters. This tactic only worked because good Presbyterians and Puritans had helped the literacy rates to soar over a twenty-year period.
Pym's targeted agents provocateur were the many apprentices of London. Apprentices were single, young, intelligent, literate, healthy, strong men with coin in their pockets and a thirst for ale, rough housing, and trouble. Think of them as the footballer fans of the day.
13. What was Morocco like at the end of the 1630's?
The large Sultanate of Morocco had suffered a civil war of succession in the 1620's, so by the late 30's the Arabic Saadi dynasty led by Mohammed esh-Sheikh es Seghir ruled a much smaller Morocco from the capital Marrakech. The northern coasts of the Atlantic and Mediterranean were controlled by Moriscos, folk banished from Spain by the Inquisition on suspicions of secretly practicing Islam. The Moriscos were the infamous privateers, pirates, and slavers best known as the Barbary Corsairs and were centered in the Corsair Republic of Salee on the northern Atlantic coast.
Since the sugar and spice trade routes ran past the Moroccan coast, the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch had, at one time or another, all built fortresses in Moroccan harbours. Since Elizabethan times the English had been trading with Morocco for saltpetre, which when mixed with charcoal and sulphur creates gunpowder, but which was also prized as a meat preservative (the salty taste in sausages).
The slave markets of the north traded in Christian whites captured by Corsairs from ships and coastal villages as far away as Ireland and Iceland. The slave markets of the south traded in blacks from Negroland. Despite the piracy and slave markets, Morocco had a very civilized, cultured, and advanced culture in comparison to backwaters such as Britain. They also had trade connections to the Far East through the Ottomans of Turkey and the Arabs of the Indian Ocean, which meant that their markets were far more diverse than Britain's.
14. What were the types of slaves?
Bond Slave (indentured slave, Peon, Pawn) - a slave until a debt is repaid, or collateral for a debt. An indentured servant becomes an indentured slave if the debt is ever sold.
Chattel Slave - an owned beast of burden. The child of a chattel woman was also a chattel whatever the status of the father.
Criminal Slave - a criminal sentenced to forced labour
Domestic Slave - a member of the owner's household. Their children were born free and could inherit.
Military Slave - a forced conscript into military service.
Trade Slave - someone abducted to be sold into forced labour.
Serf Slave - someone who is attached to a parcel of land, and is sold with the land.
War Slave - someone captured by an enemy and used as forced labour.
In England chattel slavery and the selling of indentured bonds was made illegal in 1080, likely due to the Norman preference for serf slavery and the desire to close down the thriving Bristol bond-slave markets run by the Norse-Irish. Bond slavery becomes more like chattel slavery if bond owners are allowed to sell those bonds and thereby sell the bond slaves.
Throughout English history, bond slavery was common. Most workers who colonized New England arrived there as bond slaves. Until the mid 1800's bond slaves were usually referred to as servants both in Britain and in the Southern USA.
There has been a recent re-emergence of a type of bond slavery in England due to bloated prices and lengthy mortgage terms in the housing market. Corporations tend to take advantage of people trapped in the 'golden-handcuff' effect of their mortgages ... such debtors cannot afford to say 'no' at work or at their bank.
15. Who began the shipping of Africans to the Americas?
The simple answer is plantation owners of the sugar industry (which begat the tobacco industry, which begat the cotton industry).
Although Afro-Arab slavers were transporting African slaves across the Indian Ocean by the 9th century, and although the Portuguese were using African slaves on their sugar plantations on islands off the African coast by 1450, it was the Spanish who first transported African slaves across the Atlantic Cuba and Hispaniola in 1501.
This Spanish slave trade continually increased and widened as the population of Amero-Indians was decimated by diseases such as the measles (a death rate of perhaps 90% ). The Spanish even passed laws in 1512 to protect the Amero-Indians from hard labour, which immediately increased the demand for African labour.
/> Not that this was all the fault of the Europeans. The kingdoms and warlords of tropical Africa willingly captured and sold each others' peoples into slavery for profit. Britain was late to the African slavery trade because they were using Ireland as a source of slaves, even though the Irish were ill-suited to plantation work in the hot sun.
16. Who had the patent on Barbados?
Barbados was an important island to control because it was the closest of the Caribbean islands to Africa and right in the path of the trade winds. It had ample water and food, and the warlike natives had been taken away as slaves by the Spanish before 1550. Although many ships of many nations stopped at Barbados, no one began a colony until the British in 1627. Britain's first Caribbean colony had been St. Kitts in 1623.
In 1627-8 King Charles issued a patent to colonize the island to 'the Earl of Pembroke in trust for Sir William Courten'. Pembroke was a literary fop who leant his name to the venture of the wealthy London merchant prince, William Courten, whose ships had stumbled across Barbados in 1625. Courten had learned the shipping business and made his first fortune in Holland. His Company, Courten & Money had twenty ships and by 1629 the colony was booming with 1800 residents, all of whom were tenants of the Company. The future looked rosy for Barbados and therefore for all British colonies in the Caribbean.
Unfortunately in 1629 James Hay, the Scottish Earl of Carlisle and a personal friend of King Charles, convinced the king that he had a better claim to Barbados, even though it was dated after Courten's patent. Hay sent his own governor (Hawley) to take control of the island. The colony withered in legal limbo for fifteen years. History knows this as the Great Barbados Robbery and it was typical of the corruption and incompetence of the Stuart regime.
17. What was the political situation in the Caribbean in 1640?
The Spanish controlled almost all of the mainland coastline of the Caribbean Sea, as well as all of the large islands of the Caribbean, as New Spain. The term 'Spanish Main' can be used for the coast of Columbia and Panama, or all of the mainland coast, or all of the main islands of the Caribbean. On the mainland the economic focus was on mining and spices, whereas on the islands it was sugar. The Spanish did not have the manpower to take over every small island in the Caribbean.