The Kingdom Divided: From Protest to the English Civil War – Part 2

In the summer of 1642, England stood upon the edge of an abyss. Years of political confrontation, religious disputes, and constitutional arguments had brought the kingdom to a moment of unprecedented crisis. What had begun as a struggle over taxation, royal authority, and the limits of government was rapidly becoming something far more dangerous. The language of petitions and parliamentary debate was giving way to the language of muskets, cavalry charges, and battlefield commands.

Terry Bailey explains.

You can read part 1 on the background to the war here.

Portrait of a Nobleman (said to be Prince Rupert) by the Circle of Gerard van Honthorst. Source: Public domain, Bolton Museum, available here.

For generations, Englishmen had believed that their political system rested upon a delicate balance between Crown, Parliament, and the ancient laws of the realm. Few imagined that this system could collapse entirely. Yet by the time King Charles I raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642, compromise appeared impossible. The nation fractured into rival camps, communities divided against themselves, and neighbors prepared to fight neighbors in a conflict that would ultimately reshape the political future of Britain.

The English Civil War was far more than a military contest. It was a struggle over fundamental questions of authority and legitimacy. Could a king rule by divine right regardless of parliamentary opposition? Could Parliament lawfully resist its sovereign? What role should religion play in government? These questions would not only determine the outcome of the war but would also influence the development of constitutional government for centuries to come.

The division of England into Royalist and Parliamentarian camps did not occur overnight. Throughout the 1630s and early 1640s, political loyalties remained fluid and uncertain. Many who later became committed Royalists had initially criticized Charles I's policies, while numerous future Parliamentarians still considered themselves loyal subjects of the king.

Most English people did not desire revolution. They wanted stability, prosperity, and peace. Yet events increasingly forced them to choose sides. The attempted arrest of the Five Members in January 1642 convinced many that Charles could no longer be trusted. At the same time, Parliament's growing control of government alarmed those who feared that traditional authority was being undermined. The resulting divisions cut across every level of society. Noble families split over questions of loyalty. Merchants found themselves supporting opposing causes. Clergymen preached conflicting visions of England's future. Even within individual households, husbands and wives, fathers and sons, could disagree about where their allegiance lay.

The labels that emerged reflected these divisions. Supporters of the king became known as Royalists, often referred to by their opponents as Cavaliers. The term originally implied a swaggering, aristocratic horseman and was intended as an insult, although many Royalists eventually embraced it. Parliament's supporters became known as Roundheads, a reference to the shorter hairstyles favored by many Puritans and London citizens. These labels, however, often concealed a far more complex reality. Allegiance was shaped by local circumstances, personal loyalties, religious beliefs, economic interests, and family traditions. The Civil War was not a simple contest between rich and poor, north and south, or aristocrats and commoners. It was a deeply complicated conflict that divided every layer of English society.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the crisis was the growing importance of public opinion. Previous political disputes had largely been confined to the royal court and Parliament. By the 1640s, however, political arguments were being conducted before an increasingly engaged national audience. The spread of printing played a crucial role in this transformation. Pamphlets poured from printing presses in unprecedented numbers. Political speeches were reproduced and distributed. Sermons were printed and circulated across the country. Newspapers and newsletters reported developments with growing frequency. For perhaps the first time in English history, competing political movements attempted to mobilize popular support on a national scale.

Royalist writers portrayed Charles I as the lawful sovereign whose authority had been granted by God. They argued that resistance to the king threatened the very foundations of social order. If subjects could rebel against their monarch, what would prevent the collapse of all authority?

Parliamentarian propagandists presented a very different picture. They depicted Charles as a ruler who had repeatedly violated English law and attempted to govern without regard for Parliament or the rights of his subjects. According to this view, resistance was not rebellion but a defense of England's ancient constitution.

Both sides claimed to be defending liberty.

Both sides claimed to be protecting religion.

Both sides claimed to be preserving England.

The result was one of the earliest large-scale propaganda wars in European history.

Religion lay at the heart of many political disagreements. To modern observers, it can be difficult to appreciate the intensity of religious feeling in seventeenth-century England. Questions of doctrine and worship were not regarded as private matters. They were believed to have direct consequences for the fate of the nation and the salvation of souls. Many Protestants viewed Charles's religious policies with profound suspicion. Under the influence of Archbishop William Laud, the Church of England had adopted practices that appeared, to critics, dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. Greater emphasis was placed upon ceremony, church decoration, and episcopal authority. To Puritans, these developments represented a betrayal of the Reformation.

The king's marriage to the Catholic princess Henrietta Maria only intensified these fears. Rumors circulated constantly about Catholic influence at court. Every political dispute became entangled with concerns about religion. Parliament successfully presented itself as the defender of Protestant England. This message resonated strongly among many communities, particularly in London and the southeast. For countless Parliamentarian supporters, the war became a struggle not merely for political rights but for the future of the Protestant faith itself.

Royalists, however, viewed these fears as exaggerated and often deliberately manipulated. They argued that Parliament's religious radicals threatened the established Church and the stability of the kingdom. Thus, religious concerns pushed both sides further apart, making compromise increasingly difficult.

Economic interests also shaped the emerging conflict. England in the seventeenth century was undergoing significant social and economic change. Trade was expanding, towns were growing, and commercial wealth was becoming increasingly important. Many of the kingdom's largest trading centers tended to support Parliament. London, by far the wealthiest city in England, became the financial heart of the Parliamentarian cause. The capital's merchants possessed enormous resources, and Parliament's control of London gave it access to vital loans, supplies, and manpower.

By contrast, many rural regions displayed stronger support for the Crown. The traditional social order remained influential in much of the countryside, where local gentry often exercised considerable authority and where loyalty to the monarchy retained deep roots. Yet even these regional patterns had numerous exceptions. Wealthy merchants could be found among the king's supporters, while many country gentlemen sided with Parliament. Economic considerations interacted with religious beliefs and local politics to produce a complex patchwork of allegiances. England was not divided by a single fault line. It fractured along many.

The symbolic beginning of the Civil War occurred on the 22nd of August 1642 when Charles I raised the royal standard at Nottingham Castle. The ceremony was intended to signal that the king was formally calling his loyal subjects to arms. It was a declaration that political dispute had become military conflict. The choice of Nottingham reflected strategic considerations. Located near the center of England, the town offered access to important routes and communications. Yet the ceremony itself revealed the difficulties facing the Royalist cause.

A violent storm struck shortly after the standard was raised. Strong winds reportedly tore the banner down. Many observers interpreted the incident as a divine warning regarding the king's cause. Whether viewed as a bad omen or merely an unfortunate accident, the event quickly became part of the war's mythology. More importantly, the response was initially disappointing. Fewer supporters arrived than Charles had hoped. The king possessed prestige and legitimacy, but converting loyalty into effective military power proved more difficult than expected. The Civil War had begun, but neither side yet understood how long or destructive it would become.

Unlike many continental states, England possessed no large standing army. Both sides therefore faced the immense challenge of developing military forces almost from scratch. Recruitment relied heavily upon local militias and the influence of powerful individuals. Noblemen and wealthy landowners raised regiments among their tenants and dependents. Towns organized companies of volunteers. Existing militia units were absorbed into larger military formations. The resulting armies reflected the social diversity of the kingdom.

Royalist forces generally attracted greater support from sections of the aristocracy, traditional landowners, and regions where loyalty to the monarchy remained strongest. Parliament drew heavily from London's population, commercial communities, Puritan congregations, and areas concerned about royal authority. Neither army was initially well-trained. Weapons varied widely in quality. Uniforms were inconsistent or absent. Supply systems were primitive. Officers often possessed little military experience. Many soldiers entered the war with romantic notions of honor and glory. They quickly discovered a harsher reality of exhaustion, hunger, disease, and fear.

The greatest challenge was maintaining discipline. Commanders had to transform enthusiastic volunteers into effective fighting forces capable of operating under battlefield conditions. This process would take years and would become one of the defining military stories of the war.

Among the most colorful figures of the conflict was Prince Rupert of the Rhine. Nephew to Charles I and grandson of King James I, Rupert brought valuable continental military experience to the Royalist cause. Tall, energetic, and fearless, he rapidly acquired a reputation for personal courage. His leadership of Royalist cavalry became legendary. Rupert favored aggressive attacks designed to shatter enemy formations through speed and shock. His cavalry often achieved spectacular successes. At the same time, critics argued that his impetuous nature sometimes prevented him from exploiting victories effectively.

Parliamentarian propaganda portrayed him as a ruthless foreign adventurer. Wild rumors circulated that he possessed supernatural powers and even travelled with a magical dog capable of deflecting bullets. Such stories reflected both fear and fascination. Rupert became one of the war's most recognizable figures and a symbol of the Royalist cause.

If Rupert represented military energy, John Pym represented political determination. For years, Pym had stood at the forefront of parliamentary opposition to Charles I. Through speeches, alliances, and organizational skill, he helped transform scattered grievances into a coordinated political movement. Pym understood that wars were won not only on battlefields but through administration, finance, and public support. Parliament's ability to raise money, organize resources, and maintain political cohesion owed much to his efforts. Though he never commanded troops in battle, his influence on the war's outcome would prove immense. Many historians regard him as one of the principal architects of Parliament's eventual success.

Another important figure was Thomas Fairfax. The son of a distinguished Yorkshire family, Fairfax combined personal courage with genuine military talent. During the opening campaigns, he demonstrated a capacity for disciplined leadership that would later distinguish him from many contemporaries. Unlike commanders whose authority depended largely upon social rank, Fairfax showed a willingness to learn from experience and adapt to changing circumstances. These qualities would become increasingly important as the war evolved from a conflict of enthusiastic amateurs into a struggle requiring a professional military organization. The future belonged not merely to bravery but to efficiency, discipline, and innovation.

The first major battle of the war took place at Edgehill on the 23rd of October 1642. Thousands of men assembled in the Warwickshire countryside, many experiencing combat for the first time. The atmosphere combined excitement, fear, and uncertainty. Few participants knew what to expect. Prince Rupert's cavalry launched a powerful assault against Parliament's horsemen, driving them from the field. Yet in pursuing the fleeing enemy, many Royalist riders became separated from the main battle.

Meanwhile, the infantry struggle at the center developed into a brutal contest of musket fire and pike combat. Units advanced and retreated amid confusion, smoke, and mounting casualties. As darkness approached, neither side had achieved a decisive advantage. The battle ended inconclusively.

Yet Edgehill carried enormous significance. It demonstrated that neither side could easily defeat the other. Expectations of a short war evaporated. The conflict would demand far greater sacrifices than anyone had imagined.

For ordinary civilians, the outbreak of war brought profound disruption. Armies required food, horses, carts, accommodation, and money. Communities were expected to support whichever force happened to occupy their area. Refusal could lead to punishment. Trade routes became dangerous. Markets were disrupted. Agricultural production suffered. Taxes increased as both sides sought resources for the war effort. Families often experienced the conflict in deeply personal ways. Relatives fought on opposing sides. Long-standing friendships collapsed under political pressure. Parish churches became centers of dispute as religious divisions intensified.

The psychological impact was equally severe. Rumors spread constantly. Reports of battles and atrocities circulated through towns and villages. Uncertainty became a permanent feature of daily life. For many civilians, the Civil War was not an abstract political struggle but a harsh reality that entered their homes, threatened their livelihoods, and shattered familiar certainties.

By the close of 1642, England had crossed a threshold from which there could be no easy return. The constitutional crisis that had begun with arguments over taxation and royal authority had evolved into a national civil war. The raising of the royal standard, the formation of rival armies, and the bloody confrontation at Edgehill confirmed that political compromise had given way to armed struggle.

Yet beneath the military conflict lay deeper issues that would shape the future of the English-speaking world. Questions concerning divine monarchy, parliamentary sovereignty, religious authority, and political legitimacy were now being tested in the harshest possible arena. The outcome would determine not only who governed England but also how government itself would be understood.

The kingdom had fractured into competing visions of authority and liberty. What followed would become one of the most consequential struggles in British history, a conflict that would ultimately challenge the ancient assumptions of monarchy, give birth to new political ideas, and set England upon the long and uncertain road toward constitutional government.

In conclusion, the outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 marked the moment when political disagreement ceased to be a matter of speeches, petitions, and parliamentary maneuverings, and instead became a contest decided by the sword. The raising of the royal standard at Nottingham, the hurried development of rival armies, and the inconclusive yet bloody encounter at Edgehill all demonstrated that England's constitutional crisis had passed the point of peaceful resolution. Neither Charles I nor Parliament had anticipated the scale or duration of the struggle they had unleashed. What many believed would be a short campaign to compel negotiation instead became a prolonged conflict that would consume the kingdom for nearly a decade.

Yet the significance of these opening months extends far beyond the military events themselves. The divisions that emerged in 1642 revealed a nation wrestling with questions that had no simple answers. Was a monarch's authority truly absolute if it threatened the liberties of his subjects? Could Parliament lawfully resist the Crown without descending into rebellion? Could religious unity be maintained in a kingdom increasingly divided by competing interpretations of Protestantism? These constitutional, political, and religious dilemmas transformed the Civil War into far more than a dynastic dispute. It became a profound debate about the very nature of government, sovereignty, and the relationship between rulers and the ruled.

The conflict also demonstrated that wars are fought not only on battlefields but within the hearts and minds of ordinary people. Propaganda became a powerful political weapon, shaping public opinion through pamphlets, sermons, rumors, and newspapers. Economic interests, local loyalties, and religious convictions proved just as influential as military victories in determining where communities placed their allegiance. Families were divided, friendships dissolved, and entire regions found themselves drawn into opposing camps. England was no longer a united kingdom governed by differing opinions; it had become a nation physically, politically, and emotionally fractured.

The early campaigns likewise exposed the strengths and weaknesses of both sides. The Royalists possessed experienced commanders such as Prince Rupert and enjoyed considerable support among the traditional landed elite, yet they struggled to translate loyalty into sustained military success. Parliament, under the political guidance of men such as John Pym and with rising officers including Thomas Fairfax, increasingly recognized that victory would require efficient administration, disciplined armies, reliable finance, and effective organization as much as courage in battle. The war was already beginning to reward professionalism over privilege, and this evolution would have profound consequences for the future conduct of warfare in Britain.

Perhaps most importantly, the events of 1642 shattered centuries-old assumptions about English government. The medieval ideal that the Crown and Parliament formed complementary parts of a single constitutional order had broken down entirely. Divine right monarchy had collided with an increasingly confident Parliament that believed it possessed both legal authority and moral responsibility to restrain the king. Once these competing claims were defended by armed force rather than constitutional compromise, the kingdom entered uncharted political territory from which there could be no easy return.

As the war continued into 1643 and beyond, neither side would achieve the swift victory it had expected. Instead, the conflict would become larger, more organized, and increasingly ideological. New alliances would be forged, military reforms would revolutionize England's armies, and political ambitions would grow ever more radical. What had begun as an attempt to settle a constitutional dispute would ultimately lead to the trial and execution of a king, the temporary abolition of the monarchy, and the introduction of an English republic—developments almost unimaginable when the royal standard first fluttered above Nottingham Castle.

The opening phase of the English Civil War therefore stands as one of the great turning points in British history. It was the moment when centuries of inherited political tradition gave way to revolutionary change. The questions first asked in the summer of 1642—about authority, liberty, representation, religion, and the limits of executive power—have never entirely disappeared. They continue to resonate through modern constitutional democracies, reminding us that the struggle between power and accountability, between order and liberty, is not confined to the seventeenth century but remains one of the defining themes of political history.

The next stage of the conflict would prove even more transformative. As both sides adapted to the realities of prolonged warfare, the struggle would evolve from a contest between king and Parliament into a revolution that challenged every established institution of English society. The battles that followed would decide not only the fate of Charles I, but also the future direction of the English state itself.

Now read about Terry’s series on King Kenry VIII and his wives here.

From Tulip Mania to Digital Risk Management: The Historic Lessons of Financial Self-Protection

For millennia humans have risked fortunes to make more profit, increase status, and achieve security. Financial markets and tools have changed over time, but the human desire for more still affects money-related decisions. By examining past financial bubbles, historical approaches to risk, and the regulations that followed, we can identify principles that remain useful in today’s digital environment.

Astrid Holm explains.

A 19th century depiction of Tulip Mania by Johannes Hinderikus Egenberger. Sour e: public domain, Amsterdam Museum, available here.

Editor’s note: This article is sponsored – and an interesting piece that looks at speculative bubbles in history and how people protected – and protect – themselves financially. These articles help us with site running costs and keep the site free for you.

When Speculation Went Too Far

Financial disasters often began with the same mistake: people assumed prices would keep rising and ignored obvious risks. The examples below show how that pattern appeared in different ways.

Tulip Mania, 1630s: Speculative demand showed that hype can push prices far beyond a product’s realistic value.

South Sea Bubble, 1720: Overconfidence and promises of quick profit showed that investors often take greater risks when returns appear easy.

Mississippi Bubble, 1720: Public excitement and herd behavior showed that following the crowd can hide clear warning signs.

The rise of share trading and personal risk: Heavy wagering on stocks and games shows that debt can quickly add up and cause wider harm.

Ancient maritime trade: As a counter-example, piracy, storms and accidents showed that spreading cargo across several ventures reduced the impact of one loss.

The assets and circumstances changed, but the behavior was often the same. Excitement replaced caution, and risk became visible only after the losses began.

Tulip Mania and the World's First Famous Financial Bubble

Tulip Mania in the Dutch Republic during the 1630s is one of history’s most famous speculative episodes. At the time, tulips were considered a luxury and the demand for them soared. Speculation soon pushed prices higher and higher. Prices for some rare varieties reached extraordinarily high quoted levels.

As more buyers entered the market hoping to profit from future price increases, prices became disconnected from the flowers' actual value. Then, in early 1637, several years after Tulip Mania truly gathered pace, demand evaporated and tulip prices crashed.

Some popular accounts later embellished the story of Tulip Mania. Although historians continue to debate its scale, the episode remains a useful example of how speculation and herd behavior can distort asset prices. It shows us that the fear of missing out can lead individuals to take risks they would normally avoid.

Similar patterns emerged over the coming decades in events such as the 1720 South Sea Bubble in Britain and its 1720 French counterpart, the Mississippi Bubble. Although these bubbles involved different assets, the underlying patterns of speculation, overconfidence, and herd behavior were remarkably similar.

How Past Generations Learned to Protect Their Wealth

While history contains many examples of excessive risk-taking, it also shows that humans have created different ways to protect themselves from unpredictable complications. Long before modern financial institutions existed, traders, governments, and communities developed practical methods for reducing losses.

People have also looked for ways to control how much money they commit to investing and to entertainment activities. Limiting the amount committed to a single activity can reduce potential losses, although it does not remove risk entirely.

Modern self-protection also involves deciding in advance how much money can be used for investing and entertainment. When comparing trading and other platforms with low entry, you can consult a variety of companies, including Slotozilla in New Zealand, Robinhood in the US, and Hargreaves Lansdown in the UK. When trading the markets or playing for entertainment, remember to set firm spending limits, read conditions, and avoid chasing losses.

Diversification Before Modern Finance

For thousands of years, humans have known the power of not having all their eggs in one basket. Early traders developed effective and simple ways of overcoming the risk of being completely wiped out after one catastrophic event. They used methods such as:

• Dividing goods among multiple ships, caravans, or trade routes.

• Reducing losses from piracy, storms, accidents, or conflict.

• Avoiding concentrating all resources in one venture.

• Improving the chances of recovering investments after setbacks.

While the tools have evolved, the core principle of diversification remains the same.

Early Attempts to Limit Harm

Ancient Roman authorities restricted many forms of gambling, although enforcement and permitted exceptions varied over time. Similar restrictions later appeared in European societies when rulers attempted to limit debt and social harm.

These measures were not always effective, but indicate a consistent notion that excessive financial risk-taking can create wider social and economic harm. A lot of our existing consumer protection laws, financial regulations, and laws take this attitude. Their general purpose is to reduce preventable harm while allowing lawful financial and entertainment activities to continue in moderation.

From Ancient Lessons to Modern Risk Management

The financial world today is a far cry from what it once was. People are able to send money across the world in seconds, trade securities on the internet, and monitor their accounts seamlessly. Despite these advances, many of the underlying problems remain the same. People’s emotional judgments, unfounded optimism, and poor analysis of risk still account for many financial losses.

Modern risk management is a mix of old and new technological principles. Diversification remains one of the most widely used ways to reduce exposure to financial risk. Consumers can manage risk more effectively by analyzing opportunities before committing their money.

Consumer protection measures have also expanded considerably. Financial institutions and digital platforms are subject to stronger security and accountability requirements. Responsible trading tools may include deposit and spending limits and require access to clear information. Cybersecurity is an essential, modern element of risk management.

Conclusion

Human behavior, not market technology or the nature of a particular industry, dictates how financial risks occur, how humans interact with their financial position, and what kind of precautions individuals need to take. History repeatedly shows the value of discipline, diversification, risk awareness, and self-protection. These principles remain relevant whether people are investing, gambling, speculating, or using modern digital financial platforms.

Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part II - “Don’t Yield an Inch!”

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 2 of 2 he looks at how it ended.

Part 1 on the soil of old Pennsylvania is here.

Statue of Strong Vincent at Blasco Library in Erie, Pennsylvania. Source: Pat Noble, photograph taken by self on May 4, 2007, via Wikimedia Commons here, and licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

It took the red (First Division), white (Second Division), and blue (Third Division) Maltese Cross-men of the Fifth Corps the entire night to march to Gettysburg. Famished and spent, they didn’t arrive at the Union camp at Powers Hill, a mile behind the Federal center on Cemetery Ridge and about a mile and a quarter removed from the northeastern edge of the smaller of the two round tops, until around seven o’clock on July 2nd, a couple of hours after dawn.

They were told to eat breakfast and try to catch up on sleep. As the day wore on, the commotion on the far side of the high ground ebbed and flowed – at times nearly deafening, at other times strangely quiet.

Along with rest of the corps, Strong Vincent’s Third Brigade was put in a swing position; depending on how the battle transpired, General Sykes’s men could either be sent to support General Daniel Sickles’s Third Corps to their southwest or General Henry Slocum’s Twelfth Corps to their northwest. Since late afternoon the previous day, Sickles’s men had been anchoring the Army of the Potomac’s left flank, the southern “eye” of its upside-down fishhook defensive line. Slocum’s men, meanwhile, had been assigned the area surrounding Culp’s Hill, the hook’s northeastern “bend.”  

The Federals owed their possession of Gettysburg’s high ground to the guile and cunning of cavalry commander John Buford. On Tuesday, June 30th, the day before the battle began, General Buford was on a reconnaissance patrol to assess the exact whereabouts of the Confederate forces and determine the best ground on which the Army of the Potomac should wage its fight. As soon as he rode through town, Buford recognized the strategic value of the ridges and hills that formed Gettysburg’s southern and eastern sides. Surmising that the Rebels would consolidate their troops and attack the next day from the north and west, Buford positioned his soldiers some three miles in front of the high ground. Once the shooting starts, Buford instructed his 2,700 men, fall back gradually and prevent the enemy from making a full-scale assault on the hills.

Then he sent messengers galloping to General John Reynolds, begging the Pennsylvanian to rush his First Corps to Gettysburg. Reynolds’ men the night of June 30th were encamped in northern Maryland, some eight or nine miles south of Buford’s position. If the Federals were to maintain control of the high ground, thousands – maybe tens of thousands – of reinforcements would be needed before noon; otherwise, the Rebels would gain a decided advantage.

Sure enough, Reynolds arrived early that morning, ultimately slamming his 12,000 men into the Rebel front. Within minutes, Reynolds was killed by a Confederate sniper.

Buford’s fallback strategy worked. For much of the first day, the Union forces were outnumbered and on the defensive, yet at sunset, they were still in charge of the high ground. It was Fredericksburg in reverse. Now, the other side would be forced to launch vertical attacks on entrenched positions.

*

In the aftermath of the war, various theories were put forth to explain how Strong Vincent and his brigade came to defend Little Round Top. Most scholars, however, have come to accept Oliver Willcox Norton’s version of events. Despite the chaos that engulfed them that evening, the Third Brigade’s orderly and bugler was never more than a few yards from Vincent’s side.

Professor Allen C. Guelzo, who once taught at Gettysburg College, writes in Gettysburg: The Last Invasion that Sykes was alerted in mid-afternoon that his corps would be needed to buttress Sickles’s position. An irascible Tammany Hall politician bereft of military training and instinct, Sickles had defied orders and moved his men off the high ground and down into the Peach Orchard at the base of the ridge and round tops. Thanks to Sickles’s gaffe, his corps was now vulnerable to assault from three directions. By late afternoon, Sickles was getting pummeled in and around the orchard by General Lafayette McLaw’s Division of General James Longstreet’s corps.

In one of the war’s most hotly debated moments, Confederate commander Robert E. Lee on the morning of July 2nd had ordered Longstreet to frontally assault the Union left flank. Longstreet protested, urging Lee to swing the entire Army of Northern Virginia to the right around the Union line, get between Meade and Washington, D.C., pick more favorable ground, and force the Federals to attack them. Lee refused, insisting that Longstreet try to dislodge the enemy from the hills and win the battle in front of them. Lee’s obstinance helped sound the Confederacy’s death knell.

It took the South Carolinian the bulk of Thursday to choose a location from which to launch his assault, a delay known – sardonically in Confederate lore – as “Longstreet’s Long March.” But when Longstreet finally did attack, it was with a vengeance. The Union high command’s nightmare scenario was unfolding: the Rebels were again poised to sweep the field with a bold maneuver, just as they’d done at Second Bull Run and Chancellorsville.

*

When word came from Meade’s staff that it was time for the Fifth Corps to join the fight, officers barked the commands – Fall In! . . . Attention! . . . Load! . . . Load at Will! – to their 11,000 men sprawled across Powers Hill. Still, it took the better part of an hour – beginning roughly at four o’clock, Guelzo estimates – before the Fifth Corps was fully mobilized. Sykes knew the situation was dire; he ordered his division closest to the fighting – the First – to move out as soon as possible.

Under the erratic leadership of General James Barnes, the division was at the corps’ point as it began marching toward Sickles’ position a little after quarter past four. Like Sickles, Barnes was another Union officer who had little business being entrusted with command. First Division officers, Vincent among them, knew that when a firefight was imminent, Barnes had a tendency to go hors de combat, often drinking himself into a stupor.

Barnes and his horse were apparently not at the head of the column as it moved toward the fighting, now just a few hundred yards in front of them and growing more cacophonous by the second. The First Division, with the Third Brigade in the lead, was approaching the action, scholars believe, from the north side of Little Round Top.

American military history is full of fortuitous moments, when the right officer happened to be in charge at the right moment. But none loom as large as the presence of bullheaded Strong Vincent and his intrepid Third Brigade at the tip of the Fifth Corps’ spear that late July afternoon. Like Myers and Guelzo, Edwin B. Coddington, author of The Gettysburg Campaign: A Study in Command, embraced Norton’s account of the pivotal moments leading up to the defense of Little Round Top. Coddington, Guelzo, and Myers all say that Vincent spied a young courier racing on a horse, craning his neck as he rode, clearly looking for General Barnes – and not finding him.

Vincent spurred his horse forward and intercepted the messenger, insisting that he disclose the orders he was carrying. At first the junior officer balked, saying they were for Barnes’ eyes and ears only. But Vincent, knowing that Barnes was incapacitated, would have none of it.

“What are your orders?” Vincent demanded. “Give me your orders!”

The orders, the courier eventually spat out, were for Barnes to “send one of his brigades to occupy that hill yonder.” He then pointed to the smaller of the two round tops.

Vincent replied “Very well!” and vowed to hurry his 1,300 men to the top. He then instructed the courier to inform his superiors that he, Colonel Strong Vincent of General Barnes’ Third Brigade, would take responsibility for his action. Vincent was fully aware of the gravity of what he was doing. For a brigade commander to move his men in the heat of battle without explicit orders was a court-martial offense. But there was no time to observe chain-of-command protocol with McLaws’ men about to overwhelm Sickles’ position and run like banshees toward the round tops. Soon, McLaws’ division of Georgians and Alabamians was joined by Texans and Arkansians from General John Hood’s division.

The orders that Vincent intercepted, historians believe, had originated with General Gouverneur K. Warren, a topographical engineer by training and the Army of the Potomac’s chief engineer. Earlier that afternoon, Warren had been in a group of senior officers riding with General Meade to appraise the Union left side, which the high command had been worried about all day.

Warren suggested to Meade that to get a better view of the situation, the chief engineer, his field staff, and his signal corpsmen would ride to the summit of Little Round Top and report back. Once there, Warren was alarmed to discover that Sickles’ precipitous move had left the hill almost completely deserted. Warren recognized right away that the Federals were susceptible to an attack from the enemy right. Some Rebel troops – Guelzo described them as “a pack of ravenous wolves” – had already reached the jagged rock formation at the base of the round tops known as Devil’s Den. The situation was so bleak that Warren directed his signalmen to wave their big flags, hoping it might deceive the enemy into thinking the hill was still occupied.

Warren rode down into the valley, either found Sykes or sent a messenger to him – accounts vary – and urged the corps commander to dispatch a brigade of men onto Little Round Top before it was too late. With confusion rampant and precious minutes slipping by, scholars believe that it took multiple horsebound messengers bouncing among Meade, Warren, Sickles, and Sykes before word of the potential calamity finally reached the head of Sykes’ column – and then only because Vincent seized the initiative and flagged down the nervous courier.

The whole episode was pathetically constipated on the one hand and complete serendipity on the other. “The occupation of Little Round Top at the right time and right place by Vincent’s brigade was the result of a combination of circumstances and a stroke of rare good luck for which no one person in the Union high command could claim the credit,” wrote Coddington more than a century after the battle.

         *

Whether by luck or by pluck, Vincent never hesitated in asserting control. He immediately ordered bugler Norton to sound the alarm that the brigade was shifting its position to the left – and on the double-quick. Vincent then summoned his senior regimental commander, Colonel James Clay Rice of the 44th New York, and directed him to explain the urgency of the situation to the three other regimental commanders in the brigade – and to follow Vincent’s lead up the hill.

Vincent and Norton galloped to the base of Little Round Top, desperately searching for a trail. It took a few minutes, but they found an old logging path winding up the mound’s southern face near the swale with Big Round Top. The taller hill’s woods were so thick it made it almost impassable. But loggers had removed so many trees from Little Round Top over the years that a hellbent foe could assault it from its northern, western, and southern sides. Vincent hollered at his men to sprint to the summit as the equestrian whipped his horse up the trail.

When he and Norton got to the top, Vincent looked down on “a scene of pure disaster,” Guelzo writes. By then, hundreds of Longstreet’s men from both divisions were beginning to pick their way through the rocks at the bottom of the hill, Rebel-yelling every step. Many hundreds more were minutes away from joining them.

Norton was still dutifully displaying the brigade’s colors as musket shots started crashing into the rocks behind the pair.

“Down with that flag, Norton!” Vincent shouted, according to color bearer’s own account. “Damn it, go behind the rocks with it!”

Vincent handed the reins of his horse to his orderly. Then the colonel raced along the spur of the summit, trying to determine the best strategic positions for his men to defend. He hurriedly placed the 16th Michigan, the first unit to arrive, on the right flank facing almost due west; Rice and the 44th New York he put in the right-center, also looking west; the 83rd Pennsylvania he put in the left-center, facing southwest; and the 20th Maine he placed on the extreme left, also facing southwest, with one company looking almost due south across to Big Round Top. Vincent reminded Rice that the Butterfield Twins, the 44th New York and the 83rd Pennsylvania, had fought side-by-side many times; the brigade commander wanted them to do so again.  

As Vincent situated the 20th Maine, regimental commander Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, before the war a professor of philosophy and rhetoric at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, and after it, a public servant and orator nonpareil, thought the Pennsylvanian addressed him “with a voice of awe.”

“I place you here,” Vincent thundered at Chamberlain. “This is the left of the Union line. You understand?”

Then the great-grandson of two Revolutionary War stalwarts delivered what is arguably the most consequential military order in the Republic’s history: “You are to hold this ground at all costs!”

Any retreat at all, both officers understood, could brook disaster for the Army of the Potomac, eroding its entire defensive posture, and throwing the outcome of the battle into doubt.

Vincent then ran back to the middle of the line, hollering at a staff officer to climb a bluff and keep him apprised of the enemy advance. He then turned to the 83rd’s adjutant, Lieutenant John M. Clark, and ordered him to return to the valley, find someone in command, and have him send reinforcements at once. Shouting into the ear of the Allegheny College alumnus who’d served at his side for two years, Vincent told him to deliver this message: “The enemy are coming against us with overwhelming force!”

Vincent instructed a third aide to procure more ammunition from Fifth Corps munitions officers down below. The Rebels were now getting so close that Norton put down his bugle, grabbed a musket, and jumped into the left-center of the line with his mates from the 83rd.

Things were so muddled that General Warren at this point apparently did not know that Vincent’s brigade had filled the void on Little Round Top. On his horse at the bottom of the hill, Warren spotted his old outfit, the 140th New York Infantry, commanded by Colonel Patrick O’Rorke, an immigrant from County Cavan in the North of Ireland. Warren ordered Paddy and his men to get to the top post-haste. When O’Rorke protested that his superiors expected him to follow the rest of the corps into the valley, Guelzo has Warren replying: “Never mind that, Paddy. Bring your regiment up [to the top] and I will take the responsibility.”

Warren also urged O’Rorke not to bother dressing his unit’s line once he got to the summit – there’d be no time for it.

The chief engineer was proven prescient. By the time O’Rorke and his men reached the peak, the Texans and Arkansians attacking the 16th Michigan on the right flank of Vincent’s line had begun breaking through.

“Here they are men! Commence firing!” O’Rorke shouted. A moment later, Paddy was shot through the neck, killed instantly.

The 526 men in O’Rorke’s unit had arrived in the nick of time. Together with the 44th New York and the remnants of the 16th Michigan, they succeeded in damming the Rebel surge. Soon they were buoyed by the 91st and 115th Pennsylvania and the 146th New York, whose clutch presence most likely can be attributed to Lieutenant Clark’s plea for reinforcements with the Fifth Corps’ brass.

Much of the fighting was hand-to-hand, furious and bloody. In his The Civil War: A Narrative, Shelby Foote writes that no fewer than five charges and counter-charges were mounted that evening on Little Round Top; each time the Rebels gained a toehold, they were shoved back. Vincent’s hastily-constructed line buckled but never broke.

The biggest threat came on the Federal right. In the middle of the maelstrom, Norton, Judson, and others remember Vincent running to his right to rally the Michiganders, shouting at them to get back into line. Waving Lizzie’s riding crop, he jumped onto a boulder, making himself, Nevins and Styple write, “an ideal target for hundreds of Confederate muskets.”

Moments after yelling, “Don’t yield an inch, boys, don’t yield an inch!”  Vincent was shot through the left groin. The Minié ball ended up lodged in his right thigh, shattering his pelvis and damaging other bones. He most likely collapsed on the boulder’s surface, perhaps languishing for some time before help arrived.

Amos Judson’s history of the 83rd has Vincent saying through gritted teeth, “This is the fourth or fifth time they have shot at me, and they have hit me at last.” He was carried to safety behind the 83rd’s position, which held steady throughout the carnage.

Colonel Rice of the 44th New York assumed command after Vincent was wounded. The Rebel attacks against the Federal middle and right began to wane toward sunset. But the Georgians and Alabamians on the southern side of Little Round Top kept heaving up the hill against Chamberlain and the 20th Maine. At twilight, virtually out of ammunition, Chamberlain famously ordered his remaining men to fix bayonets and countercharge down the hill.

The gambit worked, aided by the company of men close to Big Round Top. At a pivotal moment, they suddenly turned and fired into the exhausted Rebels, then joined Chamberlain’s pursuit down the slope. Before they spread themselves too thin in the darkness, Rice reeled back in the 20th Maine. Like the rest of the men in blue that night, they had more than done their job.

*

It had been complete mayhem, but somehow the four regiments of the Third Brigade and the four other Fifth Corps regiments that stormed to the top of the hill kept the Rebels from gaining control of Little Round Top. The human cost was ghastly: of the roughly 1,300 men in the Third Brigade, more than 530 of them had been killed or wounded.

As darkness settled that evening, Generals Meade, Butterfield, Sykes, Warren, et al., weren’t sure how, but they knew that Vincent had saved the day. Without Strong’s initiative, the left flank of the of the army may well have crumbled. If they had gotten clear of Little Round Top, the Army of Northern Virginia might have swung to its left and crushed the Union center in a maneuver painfully reminiscent of past fiascos.

Vincent stopped that scenario from happening – an exemplary bit of valor not lost on the high command. When Union generals made gaffes in previous battles, there was no one there to pick them up. Without the Third Brigade’s leader, Sickles might well be viewed in American history in the same ignominious light as Benedict Arnold.

*

It was pitch dark when Vincent was transported to the gruesome field hospital inside Jacob Weikert’s farmhouse on the northeastern slope of Little Round Top. Colonel Rice, Vincent’s successor, dispatched Oliver Norton to find more horse-drawn ambulances and – if the bugler could – the wounded Colonel Vincent. Groping in the darkness, Norton was not able to redirect more ambulances to Little Round Top. But he encountered injured soldiers from the 16th Michigan who said Vincent had been taken to the Weikert house.

The home was something out of Dante’s Inferno. Norton walked past dozens of men in screaming in anguish before he found Vincent. His boss had lost a lot of blood. Vincent was barely able to speak but recognized Norton and held out his hand. Norton grasped it, saying, “The boys are still there, Colonel.”

Vincent smiled and squeezed his hand, Norton wrote in The Attack and Defense of Little Round Top, his book that commemorated Gettysburg’s 50th anniversary. Norton tried to tell Vincent how much he meant to the men of the Third Brigade but was overcome with emotion and had to take his leave.

“That was my last sight of one of the most gallant heroes of the war,” Norton remembered in 1913, seven years before he died.

The Weikert home apparently proved too susceptible to stray shelling. Cannon fire the next day forced the medical staff to transport Vincent and many others to the Louis Bushman farm a mile removed from the action. By then, it was clear to the doctors that Vincent would not survive. Vincent asked to be taken to Erie to be with his wife and family but the physicians refused. He was in no condition to travel.

 “I presume I have done my last fighting,” Vincent supposedly said when told the assessment. He must have known his prognosis was bleak.

On July 4th, America’s 87th birthday, Adjutant Clark was told to find a functioning telegraph station and wire the sad news to Vincent’s family back home. He rode to Westminster, Maryland, twenty miles southeast.

The telegram reached the Vincent household late on July 5th or early the next morning. Lizzie, seven months pregnant, couldn’t possibly make the trip to Gettysburg, despite her husband’s wishes. B.B., her-father-in-law, immediately boarded a train; once there, he made arrangements to be taken to the battlefield.

When B.B. finally got to Gettysburg on July 8th or 9th, it was next to impossible to get straight information about his son’s status or pinpoint where he had been hospitalized.

By then, of course, it was too late. In his book, Judson noted that Vincent began “gradually sinking away” on July 5th, slipping in and out of consciousness. Judson wrote that Vincent believed it was “unworthy” for a soldier to display “outward manifestation of suffering.” So, Vincent kept his lips pursed through the agony.

Word that Vincent was at death’s door reached the Union high command as Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia slipped across the Potomac on their trek back to their Virginia sanctuary. Generals Meade and Butterfield petitioned President Lincoln’s War Department to give Vincent a battlefield promotion. The request was granted overnight.

Sykes, Barnes, and other senior officers came by the Bushman farm to pay their respects. It’s doubtful that Vincent was coherent enough to appreciate his elevation to brigadier general or discuss how he’d ended up at the summit of Little Round Top. By the morning of July 7th, four-and-a-half days after Vincent was wounded, it was clear that the end was imminent.

Judson described a scene in which Vincent was struggling to recite the Lord’s Prayer “when the soul of this young hero passed away to another world.” Vincent was embalmed that day so his body could be transported for burial.

Crawford Countian Clark, who’d been with Vincent since Erie Regiment days in the spring of ’61, was assigned to accompany Vincent’s corpse to Erie and help arrange the brigadier general’s memorial service. Clark headed out on Wednesday, July 8th, apparently unaware that Vincent’s father was then looking for his son around the battlefield. Strong’s body was already aboard a train when B.B. learned the awful news. Despite his grief, B.B. helped get the body of another 83rd Regiment martyr, Captain John Sell, embalmed, coffined, and sent home to Erie.

Then B.B. himself departed for home. His son’s funeral services would take place on Monday, July 13th, at the Vincent house in Erie and at St. Paul’s Episcopal.

Mourners filing through the Vincents’ parlor that day saw a coffin draped in black crepe with an American flag entwined around it. Wreaths of flowers and evergreens adorned the casket.

A detachment of U.S. Regulars from Waterford, the Vincents’ ancestral home, were pressed into duty as an honor guard. The Regulars led a lengthy procession to St. Paul’s that featured rolling cannons, members of the Erie County legal profession, foundrymen from Vincent, Himrod & Co., and a panoply of horse-drawn carriages.

The Erie Weekly Gazette reported that those who heard the “melancholy and imposing obsequies” at the service would not soon forget them. Once Reverend J.F. Spaulding concluded his funeral rites at Erie Cemetery, the honor guard fired a volley over Vincent’s grave.

“While we lament his death, and condole with his bereaved and stricken wife, father, mother, brothers, and sister, we yet point to his example as worthy of imitation by all ‘the truly noble’ and patriotic,” the reverend’s homily ended.

Colonel Rice, now the Third Brigade’s commanding officer, that week issued an announcement to his troops about Vincent’s demise. “A soldier, a scholar, a friend has fallen. For his country, struggling for its life, he willingly gave his own,” Rice wrote.

Less than a year later, Rice himself would die on another abhorrent killing field, the Wilderness battlefield in Virginia.

A friend of Lizzie’s described her as so distraught in the days after Strong’s funeral that she did not want to sleep for fear that she’d have more nightmares. Two months after her father’s death, Blanche Strong Vincent came into this world. The baby was sickly at birth and never gained full health. Blanche would not live to see her first birthday, an occurrence that was far too common in the 19th century.

Now grieving twice over, Lizzie chose to stay a member of the Vincent household. She never remarried and moved with Boyd Vincent’s family when the Episcopal priest was transferred, first to a church in Pittsburgh, then to another parish in Cincinnati. Lizzie was active in church and community work, conducting art classes for women and authoring two books: Mary, the Mother of Jesus, and Madonna in Legend and Art. She remained fluent enough in German, French, and Italian to provide translation services and collected a library full of books on art and literature. Lizzie also devoted much of her life to caring for her mentally impaired brother-in-law, Ward Vincent.

She lived for five full decades after her husband’s death, passing away at age 76 in 1914. The equestrienne was buried next to Strong and Blanche in Erie Cemetery. At the center of the family plot is a “Vincent” granite memorial with a large Maltese Cross – the Fifth Corps talisman that Oliver Willcox Norton, Strong Vincent’s flag bearer, carried to the summit of Little Round Top – engraved beneath the name.

Lizzie knew how much Norton had meant to her husband and was grateful to the bugler for keeping Strong’s legacy alive. In her will, she left him two hundred dollars to buy the best cigars he could find. Norton gently refused the money, donating it instead to a church charity.

In 1889, a quarter-century after the battle, a monument to the 83rd Pennsylvania was erected on Little Round Top. Back then, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania’s rules governing Civil War statues forbade memorials that honored individual soldiers. Although it’s clear that the bronze likeness atop the monument was inspired by Vincent, there’s no plaque that explicitly identifies him.

The monument shows the 83rd officer drawing a sword out of a scabbard affixed to his waist, which is not an accurate depiction of Strong Vincent’s actions on the evening of July 2, 1863. In his memoirs, Norton wrote that Vincent was so rushed when he dismounted at the top of the hill that he forgot to grab the scabbard from his saddle. The only “weapon” Vincent was carrying in those fateful minutes was his wife’s riding crop.

The statue of Vincent at Erie’s Blasco Memorial Library, unveiled in 1997, got his heroic stance correct. Not only is he seen waving the riding crop in a menacing way, but he’s depicted looking down – which given the proximity of the enemy when he jumped onto that boulder, was surely the direction he was staring when struck by the fatal bullet.

*

The men that Vincent trained and with whom he fought side-by-side had plenty of war left. After Gettysburg, the Third Brigade and its 83rd Regiment fought in a dozen skirmishes and in such major battles as Spotsylvania, the Wilderness, Cold Harbor, Petersburg, and in April of 1865, the final throes of the conflagration at Appomattox Court House. No brigade in the Union Army fought with greater tenacity, perseverance, or élan.

One of those fighters, John M. Clark, returned home to Meadville, started McCauley & Clark, a wholesale dealership in fine wines, liquors, ales, and cigars. He also ended up the proprietor of two different hotels and, for eight years, served as chief of Meadville’s fire department.

Clark married a local lass named Bessie Banyard in 1862. They had three children and eventually relocated to Snyder in the Oklahoma Territory, where Clark died in 1905, two years before Oklahoma became a state.

The hill that Clark, Oliver Willcox Norton, and Strong Vincent climbed under duress on the evening of July 2, 1863 was a far cry from the arid West. It looked over jagged rocks, some small creeks, a batch of fertile farmland, and off to the north, a charming village with a seminary and a college. It’s not known if Elizabeth Carter Vincent left a remembrance for Clark’s heirs; surely, though, she had a special place in her heart for the Crawford Countian who comforted her while her husband’s body was being laid to rest.

In the months after Gettysburg, Norton enrolled in a special officers training class and become a lieutenant with the Eighth Colored Regiment. In February 1864, he helped lead the Black unit at the Battle of Olustee near Jacksonville, Florida. Olustee did not go well for the Union side. Norton was fortunate that he wasn’t captured, since the Rebels had vowed to execute any White officer caught commanding Black troops.

It took three decades, but Norton finally accepted credit for composing “Taps” in 1862 with General Dan Butterfield, then a Fifth Corps brigade commander. The two worked together in taking an old French marching tune and reshaping it as a 24-note homage to the end of a soldier’s day. After more than a century and a half, the Norton-Butterfield collaboration remains a staple of solemn military occasions, a melancholy tribute to the sacrifice of American soldiers that never fails to move its listeners.

It’s not known if Norton played “Taps” on the evening of July 1, 1863, as the Third Brigade troops pitched their tents outside Hanover, but for posterity’s sake, let’s hope that he did. Soon enough that night, Vincent ordered him to blare “Assembly!”, which eventually sent scores of his mates to their deaths.

Norton became a successful Gilded Age entrepreneur. He and his brother devised a cost-effective method of manufacturing metal cans. At the turn of the 20th century, their company was acquired by the American Can Company, a spinoff from Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel.  

In 1889, the onetime schoolteacher was among the speakers as the 83rd’s monument was being unveiled at Gettysburg. “Throwing himself into the breach, [Vincent] rallied his men, but gave up his own life,” Norton said that day. “In the very flower of his young manhood, full of the highest promise, with the love of a young wife filling his thoughts of the future with the fairest visions, proud, gentle, tender, true, he laid his gift at his country’s altar. It was done nobly, gladly.”

General Dan Butterfield, Norton’s “Taps” collaborator, wrote after the war that, “No man who lived and fought in the Battle of Gettysburg did more for his country than Vincent. He was a magnificent soldier, a gentleman of high education and great ability.”

That gentleman of high education was honored by Erie in 1930 when Strong Vincent High School opened. To this day, the school takes up a full city block. Its grand sweep and classic columns are meant to inspire the ideals that Butterfield saw in Vincent: discipline and high moral character. Inspirational quotes are inscribed on the school’s facade, along with the Vincent family coat of arms, an azure shield with a silver and white half-ram above this motto: Vincenti dabitur laurea, “The laurel will be given to the victor.”

After 87 years – Abraham Lincoln’s revered four score and seven – it closed as a high school, having been consolidated with two other city schools. It was converted into a junior high and is still going – as it should – strong.

“Through our great good fortune, in our youth our hearts were touched with fire,” Oliver Wendell Holmes, the great jurist and brevet colonel with the 20th Massachusetts Regiment, wrote of the Civil War generation. “It was given to us to learn at the outset that life is a profound and passionate thing.” 

Norton and Clark lived long enough to see the Great War, World War I, decimate a different continent. The pair had fought not only in a great war, but in a Great Cause War.

In the decades following the war, Medal of Honor recipient Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain became something of a beau idéal for the celebration of that cause. Chamberlain delivered scores of speeches all over the country – North and South – saluting the Third Brigade’s heroics. But his most memorable remarks, like Norton’s, came a quarter-century after the battle at the dedication of the 20th Maine’s memorial at Gettysburg.

“The lesson impressed on me as I stand here and my heart and mind traverse your faces, and the years that are gone, is that in a great, momentous struggle like this commemorated here, it is character that tells,” the teacher of rhetoric said that day.

“What I mean by character is a firm and seasoned substance of soul. I mean such qualities or acquirements as intelligence, thoughtfulness, conscientiousness, right-mindedness, patience, fortitude, long-suffering and unconquerable resolve.”

Vincent exhibited all of those qualities, Chamberlain said, when with “earnest and prophetic eyes,” he issued his seminal order not to retreat, no matter the circumstance.

Chamberlain reminded his listeners that Vincent had bellowed into his ear “You understand?”, as Rebel Minié balls tore into the trees around them.

“I did understand with a heavy weight on my mind and spirit,” Chamberlain shared with his mates. “You understood – and it was done. Held – and at what cost?!”

The cost, of course, was grievous – but in the end, utterly worth it. Surely, Strong Vincent sensed what would happen when he leapt onto that boulder. He was our Republic’s Horatius at the most epochal gate in American history.

Now read more on the Battle of Gettysburg here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

The War of the Breton Succession: No More France?

The War of the Breton Succession, or Breton War of Succession (1341–1365), was a war over the succession to the dukes of Brittany, in north-western France, that lasted for over twenty years. The war was a major conflict in the long Hundred Years’ War, which drove both France and England into a fight for survival and a contest for supremacy in Western Europe. Talia Bega explains — and looks at how the English continued to win as the war concluded.

Part 1 on the origins of the war is here, and part 2 on the rise of the English is here, and part 3 on the rise of the English here, and part 4 on French Struggles Against the English at Crécy here, and part 5 on how the English kept winning (until they didn’t) here.

Battle of Poitiers by Eugène Delacroix. Source: Public domain, available here.

The Final Years: Poitiers

When John, the Duke of Montfort, died in 1345, his English supporters thought it was over, but, this was not the case. His son, John of Montfort, continued his father’s cause once he came of age. Meanwhile, Charles of Blois had been captured by the English at the Battle of La Roche-Derrien back in 1347 and spent the next nine years as a prisoner in England, only returning to Brittany after his ransom and release in 1356. During his long captivity, the Montfortist cause steadily gained ground in the duchy.

At about the same time, Edward III and his son, the Black Prince, were planning a much larger campaign to conquer France, known as a chevauchée, a mounted raid meant to destroy everything in its path. This campaign culminated in a turning point of the Hundred Years’ War: the Battle of Poitiers, fought in 1356.  The Black Prince, leading a large force of Gascons and Englishmen, marched deep into central France on a destructive raid. John II had inherited a monarchy already weakened by his father’s disastrous campaigns a decade earlier.

The Black Prince's campaign continued through Poitou and the Loire valley in late August, with the Prince burning everything in his path. John saw a chance to stop the invading force before it could cross the Loire, until he realized his own fate was on the line against the powerful prince. On September 18, both sides still could not reach a deal as John was determined to seek glory on the battlefield. The Prince wanted a passage through Gascony and a deal for his men, but nothing was agreed upon.

A day later, tragedy struck for France: although their army of some 14,000-16,000 men heavily outnumbered the roughly 6,000-strong English force, the powerful English longbow carried the day once again.  The battle saw two full-scale French charges; the English staged an initial withdrawal before launching a striking counterattack from behind. The French suffered heavy casualties, and worse was still to come. A few more attacks occurred, and the fourth proved decisive as the Prince's men struck unexpectedly from the rear. Amid the chaos, the king and his sons were surrounded and John was taken prisoner. John was captured, a stark low point as many of his men lay dead.  All of the king's men were split up and lost on the battlefield, uncertain of what would come next.

The French resisted until the English were victorious one more time.  Thousands of men were taken as prisoners, which was embarrassing for the French. Still, many French soldiers went into hiding, knowing they had to flee the battlefield. When John was held captive, France fell into chaos as rebellions spread, with the king of Navarre attempting to seize power. His son Charles had to sit and watch his realm fall apart as his father lay in the hands of power. John was treated quite well with various receptions and feasts as an honored guest.

Two important treaties were signed, which included the First Treaty of London in 1358 to end the war and to give up the claim to the French throne.  Two years later, the Treaty of Bretigny was signed, asking for more lands for the English and increasing the king's ransom. This is debatable, however, given how far French debts grew. After his release, France needed stabilization, especially given the losses and setbacks of the Black Prince’s campaign.

Less is known about Charles’s whereabouts during this period, though he was occupied with defending his lands from English incursions.

Over for Charles

When John turned 22 in 1362, he was sent back to France to claim his father’s destiny to become the next duke of Brittany. John tried his best to keep the peace and even proposed a treaty, but Charles refused, unwilling to split his land between the two of them. One crucial figure who aided Charles was Bertrand du Guesclin, a powerful commander nicknamed the Black Dog, who would later help France reconquer its lost territory. In 1363, he helped Charles mount a campaign against John, meeting with considerable success.

In 1364, Auray was an important spot that both sides wanted to hold; John, despite Charles’s forces being strengthened by Guesclin’s support, set his sights on it for his stronghold. The campaign opened in September, with fighting beginning on the river beside the town. Charles saw the men from a distance and, on September 29, ordered an attack on John's forces.  Charles was killed in the fighting, and Guesclin was forced to surrender to John and taken into custody.  A year later, the Treaty of Guérande was signed, recognizing John IV as the duke of Brittany, and committed Brittany to neutrality between England and France going forward. This established a male-only line of succession for Brittany, while allowing Joan of Penthièvre to retain the viscounty of Limoges along with a pension of 10,000 livres annually.  John, in turn, remained notably loyal to the new king, Charles V, a stance that helped consolidate French authority in the region.

Guesclin was released shortly after his capture and continued his campaigns in France. John, as the new duke, ruled with support from both sides but still faced continuing tension as some English barons pushed for greater control. He also declared himself a vassal to France, which shocked the English.  And, indeed, over the decades the French would become more powerful

Lessons and legacy

This conflict offers a few clear lessons. First, the French simply fought at the wrong time; had they been at their peak, as they were a century before, the outcome might have been different. Second, Edward held the advantage in strategy, building on naval victories and his claim to the French throne. Many have also pointed to poor French planning — an overabundance of men paired with weak communication — as a contributing factor. Finally, the dispute over lineage, and how rival claims could be pressed, explains how the civil war dragged on for so long.

This war is often overshadowed by the broader Hundred Years’ War, yet it offers a valuable window into Edward III’s wider strategy. It also highlights the influence of women in this period, as the two Joans became deeply involved amid growing women's power in the Late Middle Ages. These women showed real grit, operating within a system that afforded women little formal power to support their husbands’ claims. This war illustrates much of France's broader struggles, offering a simple lesson: France was, for a time, on the wrong side of fortune.

References

GRAHAM-GOERING, E. (2021). Princely power in late medieval France: Jeanne de Penthievre and the war for Brittany. CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS.

Sumption, J. (1991). The Hundred Years' War. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Che Guevara: The Path to Marxist Revolutionary - 1951-1959

In 1951 Che Guevara was still known as Ernesto Guevara de la Serna. To his friends and family, he was a restless young man, still undecided about his life's direction, who constantly craved adventure and excitement. At this point, he was a medical student with a considerable number of examinations to complete, but he decided instead to travel the length of South America. In this period, we see the transition from Ernesto the restless student and man of letters to the man who would become Che.

Steve Prout explains.

You can read part 1 on Che’s early years here.

Che Guevara in Caballete de Casas, Cuba, 1958. Source: Museo Che Guevara, Public domain, available here.

The Motorcycle Diaries

This first journey began in January 1952 with his trusted friend Alberto Granado and temperamental motorcycle “La Poderosa II.” The two left Argentina for a tortuous adventure around his home continent recorded in the infamous book “The Motorcycle Diaries.” This first journey was very much two friends on a backpacking tour surviving on their wits and lack of money. To go into finite detail will offer no valuable insights as far as the focus of this article is concerned. The reader will be best served going straight to the actual book for more detail. Instead, we pick up after Ernesto’s return from his first trip and his plans changed once again. In the second of these articles, this will follow Che Guevara's life up until his involvement in the successful Cuban Revolution in 1959.

To summarize the first trip the two comrades began in January and February of 1952 working their way through Argentina before they spent the next two months in Chile. The duo then moved through Peru in March of that year before visiting Colombia and Venezuela in the summer months of June and July 1952. The trip finished with a visit to Miami before returning to Buenos Aires. There, Ernesto planned to finish his professional studies.

Introducing Doctor Guevara

In July 1952, Ernesto returned to Buenos Aires. This time it was to finish his medical studies, to which he applied himself in earnest, passing thirteen of his medical exams in November and December 1952. Allegedly according to his father beforehand, Ernesto succumbed to infection after experimenting on human remains required by his studies. Stubbornness had won the day and that same resolve would be applied to later life. One more exam remained in 1953, and he then officially became Dr Ernesto Guevara. He told his father by telephone the good news before then telling them to their dismay that he was going to embark on further travelling. This second trip would change his life. Che Guevara’s story now gathers pace.

Back on the Road, 1953

In July 1953, he set out on his second journey. This time his journey again began in Argentina with his friend Carlos Ferrer, crossing part into Chilean territory and then into Bolivia. At first his journalling and its content was reminiscent of his first trip with the usual privations of his travels such as the limitations caused by his asthma, mechanical breakdowns, and border issues. Eventually in 1953 he reached Central America. The tail end of this journey sent him to Guatemala and then ultimately Mexico, where he had his fateful meeting with Fidel Castro.

Guatemala, 1954

Everything in Ernesto's life would change with his stay in Guatemala. Ernesto had travelled through the region at a tense time. Guatemala, or rather the administration headed by the nation's leader Jacobo Arbenz (1951–1954), had its fair share of problems with the USA and its neighbors. The President had introduced some sweeping reforms in the country during the “Ten Year Guatemalan Revolution” from 1944 to 1954. The reforms improved the lives of over half a million people and the agrarian reforms improved the lot of the agricultural community. The policy of Arbenz’s reforms was for the government to seize idle and uncultivated land and redistribute it to its people. This was a policy that a growing Marxist like young Ernesto would approve of. Ernesto became a staunch supporter of Arbenz in his time in Guatemala.

This did not sit well with the USA and corporations resident in that country such as the United Fruit Company. Those corporations lobbied President Eisenhower and the hawkish John Foster Dulles, Secretary of State to remove Arbenz via the CIA and military action. At the same time, the two US statesmen also feared the growth or strong influence of communism in Guatemala and feared for the financial stakes they had made. They could not let Arbenz continue or allow his ideas to spread throughout the rest of South America.

Ernesto, although intending to travel and fund himself through casual work within the medical profession, found himself caught up in the political furor, which he did not find unpleasant. He was keen to fight on the side of Arbenz and joined an armed militia organized by a communist group. Once the bombing began, he tried to organize this group to perform a number of supporting roles such as guarding the capital and arms negotiations to other resistance. It was all in vain and temporary; after expressing frustration with the lack of action in the group, he abandoned this idea and returned to his medical duties. Following the coup, he again volunteered to fight, but Arbenz took refuge in the Mexican embassy, and his control of his country was lost. All foreign supporters were urgently advised by him to leave Guatemala. Due to their support and involvement with Arbenz, Ernesto had now been targeted by the authorities. However, Ernesto showed no signs of being perturbed by these dangers at all.

In his letters to his mother, he confessed that being around the chaos made him feel a “little ashamed for having as much fun as a monkey” and that had felt “a magic sensation of inviolability” that led him to “lick his lips in pleasure.” This was now a man who had acquired an addiction to adrenaline and danger. His growing penchant for adventure had now been raised to higher and more dangerous levels.

Ernesto met Hilda Gadea, a Peruvian woman whom he later married in the late summer of 1955 in Mexico. Hilda was also a political activist before she met Ernesto, and her work had led her to be expelled from Peru in 1948. This did not help her during her time in Guatemala: swept up in the political turmoil alongside Ernesto, she was incarcerated in a Guatemalan prison on multiple occasions, gaining release each time only after hunger striking. The two seemed very intellectual and politically compatible, but the marriage had underlying issues that would later surface. Ernesto, it has been suggested, initially courted her as she was convenient to him on many levels such as financial support, a useful contact, a roof over his head and more so for “transactional motives” (Che’s actual words from his memoirs cannot be used here).

Meanwhile President Arbenz fled his country and was replaced by a US/Honduran-backed government headed by Castillo Armas. The new President was clamping down on any suspected communist sympathizers and supporters of its former leader. The couple therefore had to leave Guatemala amid the bombings, invasions and the new government clampdowns and headed for Mexico. The couple would both leave and arrive in Mexico separately.

In 1954, Ernesto was still nothing more than a “young Argentine vagabond who just happened to have a medical degree scrabbling for work in a foreign country.” He had acquired a taste for danger, and all that seemed to be needed now was a cause and a leader to cross his path.

Mexico and Fidel Castro, 1955

Even as late as 1955, Ernesto still had his heart set on his travels. His letters home still talked of travelling to Europe and India specifically, which were no doubt genuine, and he could change his mind at “the drop of the proverbial hat.” In a letter to his mother in November 1954, he wrote that he is “desperate to travel around Europe” and in that same letter “as for the United States I have not lost an ounce of hostility.” In explaining how he would still like to visit New York he adds “I’ll leave just as anti-Yankee as when I arrive”. His experiences in Guatemala had clearly affected him as he makes other political observations.

His views on Mexico were interesting. In a letter written in March 1955, shortly after he arrived, it is clear that his anti-Americanism followed him. He blames the upheavals going on in the country as being US instigated when he said, “Mexico has been completely handed over to the Americans.” He adds that the “FBI is much more dangerous than the Mexican police, here they act as they please and arrest anyone without a pretext.” In the meantime, his letters home talked of the struggles of finding work and political commentary.

In reality, much more was going on under the surface. Ernesto pretended in his letters to be pursuing an academic career and falsely claimed to be working on various research projects and pursuing professorships in various educational establishments. His letters up to July 1956 were those of a man with continued wanderlust, various bouts of casual jobbing, and thoughts of establishing a medical career. In truth he was preparing himself for Fidel Castro’s planned invasion and coup of Cuba. In his letter to his mother on 6th July 1956 from Miguel Schultz Prison, which he described as his “delightful mansion,” he admitted “I’ve spent much time stumbling around looking for my truth, having finding my way, and with a draught to perpetuate me, I feel I have closed the cycle”. He refers to his decision to join the cause and support Fidel Castro.

Ernesto in that letter of 6th July 1956 makes further admissions from Miguel Schultz Prison, in which he stated “over the past few months I have maintained the cover of saying I had a job as a professor, whereas in fact I have been dedicating myself to the physical training who must one day set foot again in Cuba”. Che mentions in that same letter Fidel Castro’s arrest, which implicated Ernesto himself thus ending up in prison. He further reveals, “I see my future tied to the Cuban Revolution.” So how did the two men meet and bond?

Ernesto's initial attempts at establishing contact with Castro were tentative, but he eventually met him through mutual associates. At first, on these occasions, Ernesto sat in silence and at a distance, offering little, as if he were in awe of Castro or intimidated by Castro’s overwhelming personality. It was in fact Hilda who asked Castro the bold questions about his exile. Ernesto at this point was far from the future right-hand man of the movement, but he realized that if he were going to make a mark on this world and make a name for himself, he would need Fidel Castro and to be part of his plans for the Cuban revolution.

The beginnings of a revolutionary

Ernesto committed himself wholeheartedly to the cause with a new zeal. His marriage became secondary to his new efforts. He applied strict daily discipline to his diet and gymnasium work. He also conditioned his mind with economic works, Mao and Soviet texts and regularly attended secret meetings of the Mexican Communist Party to discuss the situation in Latin America. All this was in preparation for Fidel’s Cuban assault plans. All this had to be clandestine as the FBI, CIA and Mexican authorities were always fast to swoop down on any communist activity. The danger no doubt appealed to the adventure-seeking Ernesto.

These efforts came to the attention of Castro, who rebuked his small group of forty fellow revolutionaries for not displaying the same zeal as Ernesto. Eventually his colleagues warmed to him and his disciplinarian ways, earning him a leadership title within the small ranks but that would take time, a lot of time. Ernesto immediately sought a remote and safe location to further develop training which he did successfully. He acquired a ranch in Chalco in Mexico. As he left to join his comrades there, he warned Hilda that he might not return.

Ernesto was still to be properly accepted by Castro’s group. He was still seen by this exclusive group as an interloper or a foreigner who had no business in Cuban affairs, much less organize them. He was seen as a scruffy oddball, too self-righteous and altogether disagreeable. Some commented on his lack of hygiene, in particular washing, but instead Ernesto was trying to condition himself and his colleagues for the harsh conditions of guerrilla warfare that would take place once they arrived in Cuba.  In one incident, a member refused to obey Ernesto's orders, and a court martial was instigated by Castro in his support for the man who had now been named by his colleagues as Che (Ernesto will now be referred to as Che).

Che carried on his routines with his characteristic discipline while Fidel Castro left to intensify funding and arms supplies from sympathizers in Cuba and the USA, but he was seized by the authorities in July 1956 and the whole operation looked as if it were about to be derailed... Hilda and other members were detained and charged with plotting a coup and assassination of Batista. Che was ordered by Castro to volunteer his arrest. The whole event made the national news in Mexico. Che was now coming to public prominence as a new article reported on a certain “Dr Guevara as an active member of the Instituto Intercambio Cultural Mexicano-Ruso” who was “the principal link between the Cuban plotters and certain communist organizations.”  These were serious charges and accusations, and Che was now facing the full legal and political backlash in the glare of the world’s media. He was no longer the vagabond in the background. Castro’s contacts had to arrange legal defense and representation and with that came media attention. Che then admitted his involvement with the Cuban revolutionary movement to his parents in the letter of 6th July (as detailed above). Guevara was interrogated several times as the authorities were now concerned over Che’s communist connections.

It gave his family cause for concern, rightfully so, but in a letter to his mother, who expressed worry, he simply replied “I am all the contrary of a Christ. I fight for the things I believe in, with all the weapons at my disposal and try to leave the other men dead…” he went on in a veiled rebuke of his mother’s natural concern “what terrifies me is your lack of comprehension in all of this and your advice about moderation, egotism, etc.”. It appears she had struck a nerve, but Ernesto, now Che, was fully focused.

Whilst incarcerated, Che did not acquit himself well with Castro. Che spoke too openly, carelessly, and too freely on Marxist theories and intentions that he held to his interrogators. He shared loudly his Marxist views on Latin America and the need for armed revolutionary struggle. Castro was furious with this unwanted attention and needless risk that could jeopardize his operation. He had previously denied publicly any association with communist movements and now this was being undermined by Che Guevara. Che's outspokenness was rumored to be a source of quiet frustration for Castro.

Meanwhile, Che started a series of hunger strikes whilst incarcerated. He was one of the last two of Castro’s group to be released. After his release, Che, along with Castro’s group of revolutionaries, went underground in Mexico to continue planning their assault on Cuba and Batista.

Cuba, Guerrilla Warfare and Revolution

The plans did not go well at first. The small band of men had to move around Mexico in a clandestine manner, out of view of the Mexican authorities, US and Cuban agents. Che had effectively left the marital home, warning Hilda again that he might not return. The next time the couple would meet was in 1959 after achieving victory in Cuba where Che would admit an affair and seek a divorce.

Meanwhile Castro had to overcome many financial and logistical problems while the team trained themselves. He needed money for a boat; he needed arms and more committed men. He only had forty at this time. After secretive visits to the USA, he secured $50,000, a boat and forty more men. He would eventually assault Cuba with an initial force of eighty-two men. The landings needed to be coordinated with planned uprisings in Cuba.

In November 1956, with the odds stacked against them, Castro, Che and the rest of the eighty-two men embarked for Cuba. Of those men, only twenty-two remained after most were killed almost immediately in the early stage of the assault, which was going unfavorably for Castro and favorably for Batista. The rebels sought refuge in the mountains.

Morale was low, and while they took stock and sought refuge in the Sierra Maestra mountains under miserable conditions, Che took a different approach to winning over hearts and minds. This is where his intellect was of better use than his weakened physical situation aggravated by asthma and mosquito infection. His next actions secured his promotion and elevation in the ranks. During his time in the mountains, he lived among the poor subsistence farmers. The living conditions were very grim for everyone: there were no schools, no electricity, minimal access to healthcare, and many of the adults were illiterate. Che suggested an alternative but longer path to win over the population: a strategy of “competence, diplomacy and patience".

Che set up infrastructure to serve the needs of the local population and the guerrillas. He set up factories to make grenades, built ovens to bake bread, and organized schools to teach illiterate campesinos to read and write. Alongside this makeshift community, he established health clinics, workshops to teach military tactics, and a newspaper to disseminate information. Che was promoted by Castro to the rank of Comandante of a second army column. Che would acquit himself well in the battles that were to come.

Che the Comandante

Although in combat conditions, Che was never far from his intellectual pursuits. It was something he demanded of his men. An educated guerrilla force was more effective than an illiterate one. He expected higher standards of everyone, which was certainly a trait he displayed consistently in his many roles. He was also known for his ruthlessness and had no compunction in executing traitors, a matter that is still hotly debated by historians today as to whether he was a tyrant or not.

Castro on Comandante Guevara

Castro described Guevara as intelligent, daring, and an exemplary leader who "had great moral authority over his troops” but also a man who took too many risks that bordered on a "tendency toward foolhardiness". The two in public always appeared united, but Che had attracted Castro's disapproval many times, and this would not be the last. We will assess in the final article whether Castro saw him in the post-revolutionary period as a liability.

Che and Guerrilla Warfare

Che took part in a number of battles in the two years up to victory. Not all the battles Che participated in will be recounted, but one in particular stands out. In July 1958, Guevara played a critical role in the Battle of Las Mercedes. His column halted an attacking force of 1,500 men called up by Batista's General Cantillo, whose mission was to surround and destroy Castro's forces. It involved a series of hit-and-run tactics that some military experts praise as evidence of Che's ingenuity. It was a tactic he utilized successfully multiple times. It became an essential part of his book Guerrilla Warfare, published in 1961.

The war was approaching its end. In December 1958, one of the final battles required Che to take the Las Villas province, dividing the island and its opposing forces. Using his guerrilla tactics, he soon took control of the area except the capital, Santa Clara, which required a new approach, as Che was outnumbered by government forces ten to one. He was successful in taking the capital.

On 2nd January 1959, Che entered Havana to take control of the capital. Castro followed some days afterward. This would be the last occasion Che would be successful in combat or in any theatre he became involved in. Castro had won the war, Batista fled, and Che had now achieved iconic status.

Conclusion

In 1959, Che was in the spotlight on the international stage. He had also fallen for Aleida March, a fellow revolutionary he had fought alongside, and was divorced from Hilda soon after. He was now firmly ensconced in a number of government roles to settle Cuba's internal affairs and help complete its revolution. This, however, was not enough. He wanted a stage to himself. His ideas and dreams had grown.

The next article will finish on the post-revolutionary life, a critique of Che's character, his ideas, successes and failures.

What do you think of Che Guevara? Let us know below.

Now listen to our podcast on Fidel Castro here.

Sources

I Embrace You with All My Revolutionary Fervour – Ernesto Che Guevara – Collected letters 1947-1967 – Penguin Modern Classics

The Motorcycle Diaries – Che Guevara – 1995 -Fourth Estate Paper Backs

Che Guevara – A Revolutionary Life – Jon Lee Anderson – Penguin – 1997

Back on the Road – A Journey into Central America - Che Guevara – 2000 – Vintage Uk

Guerrilla Warfare – Che Guevara – 1961 – Souvenir Press

Charles I: The King Who Would Not Yield – Part 1

The story of the English Civil War is often told as a struggle between a tyrannical king and a liberty-loving Parliament. Yet such a simple interpretation obscures the complex reality of the man whose decisions helped plunge England into one of the most traumatic periods in its history. Charles I was neither a monster nor a fool. He was a deeply religious, conscientious, and principled ruler who sincerely believed that he was defending the rightful order of society. His tragedy was that the world around him was changing far more rapidly than he understood, and his refusal to compromise transformed political disagreements into a national crisis.

Terry Bailey explains.

Portrait of Charles I Stuart (1600-1649), king of England. By Gerard van Honthorst. Source: Public domain, available here.

When civil war finally erupted in 1642, England had experienced decades of religious upheaval and constitutional uncertainty. The Reformation had shattered old assumptions about authority. New religious movements challenged traditional structures of power. Parliament had become increasingly confident in asserting its role within government. Against this backdrop stood a king whose understanding of monarchy belonged to an older age. Charles believed that kings ruled by divine appointment and that obedience to the Crown was part of God's design for society. Increasingly, many of his subjects disagreed.

Charles Stuart was born on the 19th of November, 1600 at Dunfermline Palace in Scotland. As the second son of King James VI of Scotland and Anne of Denmark, he was never expected to inherit the throne. The young prince's early years were marked by frailty and uncertainty. He suffered from physical ailments that delayed his development and left him struggling to match the expectations placed upon royal children. Unlike his elder brother Henry Frederick, who appeared destined for greatness and enjoyed widespread popularity, Charles was shy, reserved, and introspective.

The death of Henry Frederick in 1612 dramatically altered Charles's future. Suddenly the reluctant younger son became heir to three kingdoms. The experience had a profound effect upon his personality. Throughout his life he remained cautious, private, and intensely self-controlled. Those who knew him often commented on his dignity and seriousness, qualities that could inspire respect but also produce distance between the king and his subjects. He possessed courage and conviction, yet lacked the flexibility and political instinct that often prove essential to successful leadership.

When Charles inherited the throne in 1625, he also inherited the political philosophy of his father, James VI and I. James had been one of the most articulate defenders of royal authority in Europe. He believed firmly in the Divine Right of Kings, the doctrine that monarchs derived their authority directly from God rather than from the consent of their subjects. According to this thought process, kings were accountable primarily to God and not to representative institutions such as Parliament.

James, however, had combined these beliefs with considerable political skill. Although he frequently quarreled with Parliament, he generally understood when compromise was necessary. Charles inherited the principles but not the pragmatism. To him, monarchy was not simply a political institution; it was a sacred office established by divine will. Challenges to royal authority therefore appeared not merely as constitutional disputes but as threats to the God-given order of society itself.

The king's marriage further complicated his position. Shortly after ascending the throne, Charles married Henrietta Maria of France, a Catholic princess and sister of the French king Louis XIII. In an England still haunted by memories of religious conflict, the marriage immediately generated suspicion. Protestant fears of Catholic influence remained strong, and many English subjects viewed the new queen with deep unease.

Henrietta Maria's open practice of Catholicism fueled rumors that the royal court was becoming a center of Catholic influence. While many of these fears were exaggerated, perceptions often proved more important than reality. Throughout Charles's reign, critics repeatedly pointed to the queen's religion as evidence that England's Protestant identity was under threat. The marriage therefore became a symbol of wider anxieties about the king's religious policies and political intentions.

Relations between Charles and Parliament deteriorated almost from the beginning of his reign. England became involved in a series of unsuccessful military ventures against Spain and France that required substantial financial resources. Traditionally, monarchs relied upon Parliament to grant taxes needed for such campaigns. Parliament, however, increasingly expected concessions and reforms in return for financial support.

Charles regarded these demands as unacceptable intrusions upon royal authority. Parliament, meanwhile, believed it was defending the ancient rights and liberties of English subjects. What began as disputes over taxation soon evolved into a broader constitutional struggle over the nature of government itself.

The conflict reached a significant turning point in 1628 with the presentation of the Petition of Right. This remarkable document sought to reaffirm long-established legal principles by declaring that the Crown could not impose taxes without parliamentary consent, imprison subjects without due process, or use martial law arbitrarily. Parliament regarded the Petition as a necessary safeguard against royal overreach.

Charles reluctantly accepted the measure, but his acceptance concealed fundamental disagreements. Parliament believed the Petition represented a binding constitutional settlement. Charles viewed it as a temporary political necessity. Neither side fully appreciated how incompatible their interpretations had become. The seeds of future conflict had already been planted.

In 1629 the king took a dramatic and unprecedented step. Frustrated by continual disputes, he dissolved Parliament and embarked upon a period of government without parliamentary involvement. This era, later known by critics as the Personal Rule, would last for eleven years.

The Personal Rule remains one of the most controversial periods of Charles's reign. His opponents later condemned it as an era of arbitrary government and unconstitutional behavior. Yet the reality was more complicated. England remained largely peaceful during much of the 1630s. Commerce expanded, administration functioned effectively, and many people experienced stability and prosperity. To supporters of the Crown, the absence of parliamentary conflict appeared beneficial.

Nevertheless, significant tensions simmered beneath the surface. Charles sought alternative sources of revenue that avoided dependence upon Parliament. The most controversial of these was Ship Money. Traditionally imposed on coastal communities during times of emergency, the tax was extended across the kingdom and levied during peacetime. Although courts initially upheld its legality, many subjects regarded the measure as evidence that the king intended to govern indefinitely without parliamentary consent.

At the same time, Charles became increasingly associated with religious reforms championed by William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury. Laud believed that the Church of England should emphasize ceremony, beauty, and order in worship. Churches were renovated, altars were repositioned, and greater attention was paid to liturgical practices.

To Charles and Laud, these reforms restored dignity and reverence to religious life. To many Protestants, especially Puritans, they appeared dangerously close to Roman Catholicism. Religious disagreements quickly acquired political significance. If the king could impose controversial religious changes without consultation, many feared that no effective limits existed upon his authority.

Religion in seventeenth-century England was never merely a matter of personal belief. It shaped political loyalties, social identities, and concepts of national purpose. Consequently, opposition to Laud's reforms became intertwined with broader concerns about royal power. What Charles regarded as the promotion of unity increasingly appeared to his critics as evidence of authoritarian ambition.

The crisis finally erupted in Scotland. In 1637 Charles attempted to introduce a new prayer book into the Scottish Church. The reaction was immediate and explosive. Many Scots viewed the measure as an attack upon their Presbyterian traditions and religious independence. Riots broke out, resistance spread rapidly, and opposition soon became organized through the National Covenant.

The resulting Bishops' Wars exposed the weaknesses of Charles's position. Suppressing the Scottish rebellion required military resources that he simply could not afford. After more than a decade of ruling without Parliament, the king found himself forced to summon one.

The Parliament that assembled in April 1640 became known as the Short Parliament because it lasted only a few weeks. Rather than immediately granting funds, members focused upon grievances concerning royal policies. Frustrated by their resistance, Charles dissolved the assembly. The decision proved disastrous. Military setbacks continued, financial pressures mounted, and by November he had no choice but to summon another Parliament.

This new assembly became known as the Long Parliament, and it would fundamentally alter the balance of power within England. Members moved aggressively against the king's closest advisers. William Laud was imprisoned. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and one of Charles's most capable supporters, was executed. New legislation sought to ensure that future monarchs could not rule without Parliament for extended periods.

The atmosphere of distrust deepened throughout 1641. News of rebellion in Ireland generated widespread fear and uncertainty. Both king and Parliament believed military action was necessary, but neither trusted the other with control of armed forces. Questions that had once seemed abstract constitutional issues now carried immediate practical consequences.

The breaking point came in January 1642. Charles entered the House of Commons with armed guards and attempted to arrest five leading parliamentary members on charges of treason. The men had already escaped, and the king's action shocked contemporaries across the political spectrum. For many English subjects, the attempted arrest confirmed their fears that Charles was prepared to use force against Parliament itself.

The incident destroyed what little trust remained between king and Parliament. Reconciliation became increasingly unlikely. Both sides began gathering supporters, stockpiling weapons, and preparing for the possibility of war. Political disagreements that might once have been settled through negotiation now seemed irreconcilable.

By the summer of 1642 England had become a nation divided. Families, communities, and counties found themselves drawn into opposing camps. Royalists believed they were defending lawful monarchy and the divinely ordained structure of society. Parliamentarians insisted they were protecting England's liberties and constitutional traditions. Both sides claimed legitimacy. Both believed God favored their cause.

When Charles raised his royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642, the English Civil War officially began. Yet the conflict was about far more than the fate of one king. It represented a profound struggle over the nature of political authority, the relationship between religion and government, and the source of legitimate power within the state.

Charles I remains one of history's most tragic rulers because his greatest virtues became the source of his downfall. His integrity, faith, and determination commanded admiration, but his inability to compromise prevented him from adapting to changing circumstances. He saw himself as a guardian of sacred principles, while his opponents increasingly viewed him as a threat to English liberty. Between these competing visions lay a gulf that neither side could bridge.

The crisis of Charles's reign would unleash forces that transformed England forever. Questions about sovereignty, representation, religious authority, and the limits of government would dominate the decades that followed. The struggle between king and Parliament would evolve into a revolution, an experiment in republican government, and ultimately the emergence of a constitutional monarchy. In many respects, the modern political world began with the failure of Charles I to understand that power in England was no longer what it had once been.

The tragic conclusion of Charles I lies not in simple villainy or incompetence, but in the collision between a deeply held belief system and a society undergoing profound transformation. He was a king shaped by the assumptions of an earlier age, convinced that monarchy was a sacred institution ordained by God and that preserving royal authority was synonymous with preserving order itself. In many respects, Charles never believed he was acting against the interests of his kingdoms. Rather, he saw himself as defending them against forces that threatened to unravel the natural and divine structure of government. Yet it was precisely this certainty that rendered compromise impossible.

Throughout his reign, every major dispute, whether over taxation, religion, military authority, or constitutional principle was intensified by a fundamental disagreement about where sovereignty ultimately resided. Charles viewed concessions as dangerous precedents that weakened the Crown's God-given authority. Parliament increasingly viewed resistance as necessary to protect the ancient rights and liberties of English subjects. Neither side initially sought revolution, yet both became trapped within a cycle of mistrust from which there seemed no escape. What began as political disagreement gradually evolved into an ideological struggle that challenged the very foundations of the English state.

Religion further deepened these divisions. In seventeenth-century England, faith and politics could not be separated. Charles's support for Archbishop Laud's reforms, his marriage to a Catholic queen, and his attempts to impose religious uniformity across his kingdoms convinced many Protestants that both their faith and freedoms were under threat. At the same time, Charles regarded religious conformity as essential to national unity and social stability. The result was a conflict in which both sides believed they were defending sacred principles, making reconciliation increasingly difficult and ensuring that political disputes acquired a moral and spiritual intensity.

The breakdown of trust between Crown and Parliament was perhaps the most decisive factor of all. By the time Charles entered the House of Commons to arrest the Five Members in January 1642, the constitutional relationship upon which English government depended had effectively collapsed. The king no longer trusted Parliament to govern responsibly; Parliament no longer trusted the king to rule lawfully. Once that trust disappeared, political institutions could no longer contain the tensions that had accumulated over decades. The resort to arms became not inevitable, but increasingly probable.

The outbreak of civil war in 1642 marked far more than a struggle between rival political factions. It represented a revolutionary moment in English history. For the first time, fundamental questions about authority, legitimacy, representation, and the nature of government would be contested not only in Parliament and royal councils, but on battlefields across the kingdom. The conflict would challenge long-established assumptions about monarchy, inspire unprecedented political debate, and ultimately lead to the trial and execution of a reigning king, an event that shocked Europe and altered the course of history.

Yet Charles's legacy extends far beyond his own lifetime. The constitutional issues raised during his reign did not disappear with his death. Instead, they continued to shape the political evolution of Britain for generations. The struggle between royal prerogative and parliamentary authority would eventually produce a constitutional settlement in which monarchs ruled with Parliament rather than above it. Ideas concerning representative government, the rule of law, and limitations upon executive power would emerge strengthened from the turmoil. In this sense, the crisis of Charles's reign became a crucial stage in the development of the modern state.

As England moved towards civil war, few contemporaries realized that they stood at the threshold of a political transformation that would reverberate far beyond their own century. The conflict that Charles helped unleash would reshape government, redefine sovereignty, and influence constitutional thought throughout the English-speaking world. His story is therefore not merely the story of a king who lost his throne. It is the story of an age in transition, when medieval concepts of divine monarchy collided with emerging ideas of parliamentary government and popular political participation.

The raising of the royal standard at Nottingham in August 1642 marked the end of one chapter in English history and the beginning of another. Ahead lay years of bitter warfare, political experimentation, religious upheaval, and revolutionary change. The questions that Charles I could not answer peacefully would now be decided by armies in the field, and the consequences would transform England forever.

Now read about Terry’s series on King Kenry VIII and his wives here.

When St Helena Held the Boers: Britain's Forgotten Prison Island

A century after Napoleon's death, thousands of Boer prisoners unexpectedly transformed life on one of Britain's most remote possessions. Richard Clements explains. Richard Clements explains.

A view of St Helena, circa 1790. Thornton, engraver, published by A. Hogg. Source: Public domain, available here.

In April 1900, St Helena found itself entering another unexpected chapter in its long and unusual history.

Nearly eighty years had passed since Napoleon Bonaparte had died on the island, yet once again ships were approaching Jamestown carrying defeated enemies of Britain. This time they were not emperors and marshals, but exhausted Boer prisoners captured during the war in South Africa.

Governor Robert Armitage Sterndale seems to have understood that emotions might easily run high. Before the prisoners arrived, he urged the islanders to show restraint and courtesy. Whatever side they had fought on, these men had gone to war for what they believed was their country's cause.

On 11 April 1900, the first contingent of 514 prisoners came ashore. By the end of the war, somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 Boer prisoners had passed through St Helena. The effect on the island was immediate. Suddenly, a small community found itself sharing the island with thousands of unexpected newcomers.

Another Prison Island

Britain's military authorities had never expected to care for so many captives. As the war dragged on, prisoner camps in South Africa became increasingly overcrowded and vulnerable. Men were sent across the Empire to places including Bermuda, India, and Ceylon.

St Helena offered an obvious solution.

The same remoteness that had once confined Napoleon now appealed to officials faced with a very different problem. Surrounded by thousands of miles of ocean, the island seemed secure enough to hold thousands of prisoners.

Among the first arrivals was General Piet Cronjé, whose surrender at Paardeberg had shocked the Boer republics. Punch magazine later imagined the defeated commander saluting Napoleon's ghost with the words, "Same enemy, Sire! Same result!"

Lord Roberts allowed Cronjé's wife Hester to accompany her husband, and the couple were accommodated at Kent Cottage near Half Tree Hollow rather than in the camp itself. According to later accounts, the general insisted that proper respect should be shown to his rank and was even provided with a mounted guard made up of members of the St Helena Volunteers.

A Canvas City

Most of the prisoners were marched to Deadwood Plain, a windswept plateau overlooking the sea and not far from Longwood, where Napoleon had spent his final years.

Arthur Montefiore Bryce later described Deadwood Camp as a "canvas city."

Rows of tents spread across the open ground. Contemporary accounts suggest that each tent might contain as many as twelve men. Before long, the camp became overcrowded and permission was granted for prisoners to construct their own shelters using whatever materials they could find.

Paraffin tins, scraps of timber, bamboo, and cloth all found new uses.

The prisoners gave their growing settlement a nickname.

Blikkiesdorp.

Tin Town.

As more transports arrived, a second camp was established at Broadbottom. There, another improvised settlement emerged. The men called it Lappiesdorp, or Rag Town. Differences between Transvaalers and Orange Free Staters, together with simple overcrowding, encouraged the separation.

Later still, another division appeared. Men willing to swear allegiance to the British Crown found themselves deeply unpopular with those who remained committed to the republican cause. Deadwood No. 2 became known officially as Peace Camp, though not everyone used that name. Depending on whom one asked, it was also remembered as Jam Camp or Judas Camp.

Life Behind the Wire

The pages of Kamp Kruimels, the camp newspaper, suggest that life was not entirely given over to monotony.

Christmas brought decorated halls, church services, and parcels sent from Europe. More than 1,400 gifts arrived from supporters overseas. Rugby and cricket attracted enthusiastic followings, and arguments over sport seem to have been as common then as they are now.

Small businesses sprang up throughout the camp. Advertisements appeared for bakeries, confectioners, painters, engravers, and walking-stick makers. There were cafés, a brewery, and a surprising range of craftsmen.

Deadwood had begun to resemble something more than a prison camp.

As evening approached, singing could often be heard across the plain. There were choirs, brass bands, and string groups, and more than one visitor remarked upon the sound of hymns drifting over the tents.

Among the prisoners listening to those voices was Erich Mayer, a German-born volunteer who had joined the Boer cause. After the war, he became one of South Africa's most respected artists. His sketches preserved scenes from St Helena long after the camps themselves had vanished.

Sports also helped pass the time. Contemporary reports describe cricket, football, athletic meetings, and concerts. Reuters dispatches noted competitions lasting several days, while visitors remembered camp life as surprisingly active.

Many prisoners sought work, not simply for the money but to relieve the boredom of confinement.

Tensions and Escape

Life on St Helena was generally peaceful, but it was not without difficulties.

Persistent troublemakers occasionally found themselves confined in High Knoll Fort overlooking Jamestown. Serious incidents remained rare. One prisoner was shot and killed by a sentry in early 1901 following repeated attacks on guards with stones and other missiles. A military inquiry followed.

Escape attempts provided rather more colorful episodes.

One of the most famous involved Hans Eloff, a relative of President Paul Kruger. Together with several companions, he seized an old fishing boat at Sandy Bay and attempted to persuade local fishermen to help.

The escape soon descended into something close to farce.

Floorboards were ripped up in an effort to fashion paddles and money was offered to the fishermen, but the islanders stood firm. By the following morning, the would-be fugitives had been returned to custody.

Other schemes fared no better. One prisoner attempted to hide inside a crate marked "Boer Curios." Another pair stole a small water boat named Phoebe, only to be recaptured soon afterward.

For most prisoners, the surrounding ocean proved a more effective barrier than any fence.

The Island Changes

The Boers altered life on St Helena in ways few people had anticipated.

Local farmers benefited from increased demand for produce. Vegetables, eggs, cheese, and other goods commanded higher prices. Some prisoners entered the service of farmers and tradesmen, while others worked on roads and wharf improvements.

Governor Sterndale's administration employed groups of prisoners on public works. Reuters reports observed that many actively sought employment simply to break the routine of camp life.

The changes were not entirely beneficial. Fuel prices rose and heavy wagon traffic damaged roads. Yet many islanders later looked back on the period as an unexpected economic boost.

Relations between prisoners and residents appear to have been remarkably good. Before departing, German prisoners expressed their gratitude to the people of St Helena for the kindness shown to them during what they called the gloomy days of captivity.

For a small island community, the experience had been extraordinary.

Those Who Stayed

Most of the prisoners eventually returned to South Africa.

Not all of them did.

Some married local women and chose to remain on the island permanently.

Charles John Smith had been captured at Elandslaagte in 1899 and transported to St Helena with his brother Alfred. When repatriation finally came, Charles made a decision that surprised many others.

He stayed.

Known locally as "Boer Smith," he ran a bakery and became one of Jamestown's best-known characters. People who knew him later remembered a talkative man who delighted in telling stories and slipping back into old-fashioned Afrikaans whenever South Africans happened to appear.

He died in 1958 and was buried in St Paul's churchyard.

Members of his family remain part of St Helena life today.

A Cemetery on the Hillside

Not everyone lived to see the end of the war.

During 1902, enteric fever spread through the camps and deaths began to mount. By the time the prisoners departed, 180 men had been buried on the island.

According to several later accounts, Anglican authorities declined to use Anglican burial grounds and the Baptist community provided land at Knollcombes. There a cemetery was established on a steep hillside in the island's interior.

In 1913, the government of South Africa sent two granite obelisks listing the names and ages of the dead. The youngest was sixteen. The oldest sixty-one.

Today, little remains of Deadwood or Broadbottom beyond markers, photographs, and memories. The winds still sweep across the same hills, and the cemetery at Knollcombes remains quiet.

Yet traces of those years survive in family names, museum collections, and stories that have become part of St Helena's own history.

Long after the tents vanished, the Boer years never entirely left the island.

Now read about Napoleon’s secret plan to escape to America here – rather than St Helena

Further Reading

Alana Bailey, "Boer Graves on St Helena."

A. J. Nathan, "Boer Prisoners of War on the Island of St Helena," Military History Journal, Vol. 11, No. 3/4 (1999).

Arthur Montefiore Bryce, "Life in Camp at St Helena," Temple Bar.

Ben Viljoen, My Reminiscences of the Anglo-Boer War.

British Newspaper Archive.

E. L. Jackson, St Helena.

Philip Gosse, St Helena, 1502–1938.

Deadwood Camp Gedenksboek and surviving issues of Kamp Kruimels and De Krijgsgevangene.

St Helena Guardian (1900–1902).

St Helena Island Info.

Colonel Strong Vincent and the Epic Struggle for Little Round Top at the Battle of Gettysburg: Part I - The Soil of Old Pennsylvania

A 26-year-old Union brigade commander risked being court-martialed when, without orders, he rushed his four regiments to the summit of an undefended hill at a crucial moment during the Battle of Gettysburg. The Harvard graduate’s valor may have saved the Army of the Potomac – but it cost him his life. Timothy M. Gay explains – in part 1 of 2.

Colonel Strong Vincent. Source: Public domain, Library of Congress, available here.

The bugle blare ordering the men to break camp that steamy Wednesday evening could not have come at a worse moment. Having not eaten a restful meal in days, the 1,300 soldiers of the Third Brigade, First Division, Fifth Corps of the Army of the Potomac had just settled down to supper when the dreaded “Assembly!” call came screeching through their campground.  

Now the infantrymen weren’t just ravenous, they were spitting mad. No doubt muttering curses while gulping a last bite of salted beef, they doused their fires, struck their tents, grabbed their equipment, and scrambled into formation. A dozen miles off, they could hear sporadic cannon fire. At first the noise was muffled, like distant thunderclaps from the summer storms that stalked them on their grueling trek north from Virginia. But as the Fifth Corps’ ten brigades – nine infantry, one artillery – hustled west, kicking up clouds of dust in what was already searing heat, the sounds grew sharper and more ominous.

General George Sykes, who had taken command of the corps just days before when President Lincoln elevated Major General George Meade to overall head of the Army of the Potomac, pushed his men past the brink of exhaustion. By the middle of the night, one Fifth Corps soldier recalled, “all human endurance was on the verge of utter collapse.”

Private Oliver Willcox Norton, a former northwestern Pennsylvania schoolteacher, was lucky. As a bugler, color bearer, and orderly, Norton was given a horse to keep abreast of the Third Brigade’s commanding officer. But almost every other enlisted man in the corps that night was struggling to stay upright, dragging one foot in front of the other.

Squinting their eyes in the purplish predawn, the men could make out a pair of hills to their left, a slight ridge dead ahead, and a mound to their right. They knew that beyond that high ground, a fierce battle was raging outside a crossroads called Gettysburg. It was now Thursday, July 2, 1863.

Third Brigade veterans had no illusions about the cataclysm that awaited them. At Gaines’ Mill in June of 1862, mired in the swamplands of Virginia’s Chickahominy River, they were caught in an ambush, losing close to half their men. Eight weeks later at Second Bull Run, many of them were forced to make a reckless charge into Confederate General Stonewall Jackson’s entrenched line; again, they suffered horrific losses. Four months removed from the Manassas debacle, under withering fire at Fredericksburg, elements of the Third crept as far up Marey’s Heights as any Federal unit. In frigid weather, they spent the better part of two days hunkered down within a stone’s throw of the Rebel front, trying to drown out the cries of wounded comrades. When their mates expired, as Michael Shaara described in The Killer Angels, they used the dead bodies as macabre shields against enemy fire.

Halfway through another year, their new brigade leader was predicting that a decisive clash was on the horizon. “We move tomorrow for the Pennsylvania border,” he had written two days earlier to his 25-year-old bride. Seven months pregnant with their first and only child, Elizabeth Carter Vincent was at their home some 330 miles northwest in Erie, Pennsylvania. Like her husband, “Lizzie” was a graceful equestrian. Acquaintances marveled at what a handsome couple they made while riding in tandem. Lizzie was also an accomplished scholar in an age when few women received formal educations; she was fluent in four languages and a devotee of religious art.

“A general battle must ensue soon,” the colonel penned in what proved to be his final letter to his wife. “[The enemy’s] fate is sealed.”

Lizzie’s husband did not suffer fools gladly. He knew his stern visage and burly frame were intimidating – and learned to use them to full effect. Thick-necked and barrel-chested, he had powerful arms, deep-set eyes, and a pair of bristly side whiskers that matched a flinty temper. As a youngster, he had won more than his share of fistfights and wrestling bouts.

It wasn’t just the Army of Northern Virginia whose fate was sealed in the early summer of 1863. At noontime on July 1stas the brigade crossed into his native commonwealth, the colonel ordered that the tattered colors of the Pennsylvania regiment under his aegis – the 83rd Infantry, the outfit that two years earlier he had helped organize – be unfurled, including a banner with its designated corps insignia, a crimson Maltese Cross. The cross symbolized the Fifth Corps’ devotion to God in eradicating evil; in the Union Army’s troop identification system, the color red meant it belonged to the corps’ First Division.

With the 83rd’s flags fluttering, the colonel rode through the brigade, directing his men to give three cheers for the Keystone State. “Hip, hip, hooray, Pennsylvania!” they hollered three times, happy to be north of the Mason-Dixon Line for the first time in more than a year. As dusk descended and the brigade neared its campsite outside Hanover, the colonel again ordered that the 83rd’s colors be uncased, but this time with a drum corps providing ceremonial pomp.

Once the sun disappeared that evening, Private Norton in all likelihood serenaded the men with “Taps,” the mournful end-of-day bugle call he had cowritten a year earlier with General Dan Butterfield. Butterfield, a veteran Fifth Corps officer, was now serving as General Meade’s chief of staff.

Norton and his old cohorts in the 83rd Pennsylvania were an eclectic mix. They hailed from different parts of the commonwealth, but mainly from Erie and its neighboring counties: Warren, Crawford, Venango, and Mercer. Before the war, Norton had taught school in Girard, a farm village southwest of Erie. Besides teachers and farmers, the 83rdincluded boatsmen, blacksmiths, bricklayers, barmen, carpenters, wagon drivers, railroaders, store clerks, shop owners, a few foundry workers, and a smattering of immigrants from Ireland and Germany – plus one notable second-generation Scottish-American. They fought with such ferocity in so many battles that at war’s end it was determined that only one regiment in the entire Union Army – the Fifth New Hampshire – had suffered a higher casualty rate.

They were proud to be called “Mud Turtles,” after an episode early in the war when one of its charges stuck a small Confederate flag onto a turtle's flipper and let it waddle around in the muck, to the cackling amusement of men from other units.

But none of the Mud Turtles were cackling as their colors were being presented at sunset on the outskirts of Hanover. To the martial thump of drums, Colonel Strong Vincent, the Third Brigade’s brand-new commander and the former head of the 83rd, removed his hat, bowed his head, turned to his adjutant, a lieutenant of Scottish descent from Meadville in Crawford County named John M. Clark, and uttered: “What death more glorious can any man desire than to die on the soil of old Pennsylvania fighting for that flag?”

 *

“What death more glorious?” It’s such a poignant phrase that authors James H. Nevins and William B. Styple used it as the title of their 1997 book about the unflinching young man who sacrificed his life for something beautiful and profound: the preservation of the American Republic.

Did the 26-year-old Strong Vincent, a Harvard graduate and scion of one of Erie’s most prominent families, truly wax thatpoetic the evening before being mortally wounded? Well, none of us were there, so it’s impossible to know.

We know this much, however: amid all its bloody fratricide, the mid-19th century was an intensely romantic age. As filmmaker Ken Burns lovingly captured in his series The Civil War, combatants and non-combatants alike – from Abraham Lincoln to the spouse of the lowliest private – tended to emote in lyrical terms, often citing biblical passages and classic verse.

Indeed, a National Park Service essay on the Battle of Gettysburg suggests that Vincent’s “glorious death” prophesy may have been inspired by poet Thomas Babington Macaulay. The Englishman’s epic 1842 work, known informally as Horatius at the Gate, saluted the Roman martyr’s courage in defeating the invading Etruscans in 509 BC. During Vincent’s schoolboy days at the private Erie Academy, Horatius was surely assigned as must-memorize literature:

Then out spake brave Horatius,

The Captain of the Gate:

“To every man upon this earth

Death cometh soon or late.

And how can man die better

Than facing fearful odds,

For the ashes of his fathers,

And the temples of his gods.”

Still, the enlisted man who ascribed the death musing to Vincent – his orderly Norton who, a half-century later, wrote a pair of memoirs that had a lasting effect on Civil War scholarship – was doubtless eager to trumpet his dead boss’s heroics. The “Taps” cocomposer may have exercised some literary license. Perhaps Vincent’s actual words that evening were a bit more prosaic.

But there was nothing prosaic about Vincent’s gallantry the next night astride Little Round Top. Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and his 20th Maine Regiment – heralded by Shaara, Burns, a host of other chroniclers, and not incidentally, the publicity-and-legacy-seeking future governor, Chamberlain himself – are justly revered for their twilight stand on Little Round Top’s southwestern slope. Too often overlooked, however, is the brigade commander who, with Minié and cannon balls shrieking through the air and thousands of wild-eyed enemy infantrymen clambering up the hill, brilliantly positioned the 20th Maine, the 83rd Pennsylvania, and his two other regiments, the 44th New York and the 16th Michigan. Despite his Horatius-like role in repelling the attackers, Vincent got nary a mention in Professor James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, the much-admired book that cracked the bestseller lists.

Amid the pandemonium that night, Vincent had the presence of mind to tell Chamberlain that his 360 Mainers now represented the extreme left flank of the Army of the Potomac. Any retreat whatsoever, Vincent admonished, could spell catastrophe.

“You understand?! You are to hold this ground at all costs!” Vincent yelled into Chamberlain’s ear as the bedlam below grew louder. Then the Pennsylvanian raced off to rally the rest of his troops.

Within minutes, the Rebels were threatening to swamp the right side of the Third Brigade’s line; they were as close to Vincent’s position as he had gotten to theirs at Fredericksburg. He leapt atop a boulder, brandishing the riding crop that Lizzie had given him as a keepsake, bleating, “Don’t yield an inch, men! Don’t yield an inch!”

Seconds later, he keeled over, shot through the hip and groin.

*

It would have come as no surprise to Thomas Babington Macaulay that the ashes of Strong Vincent’s forebears burned deep. Ancestors on both sides of his family fought in the American Revolution. His paternal great-grandfather, Cornelius Vincent, along with two of his sons, Strong’s great-great uncles, were captured in 1779 by British infantry at the Battle of Fort Freeland in Northumberland County, Pennsylvania; all three were exiled to a prison camp in Quebec, where they spent the next three years in captivity. His maternal great-grandfather, Timothy Strong, enlisted in a Litchfield County, Connecticut, volunteer outfit at age 55 and helped underwrite the Patriot cause.  

Strong Vincent was born in Waterford, a picturesque village a dozen miles south of Erie, in the spring of 1837, the first-born child of Bethuel Boyd (B.B.) Vincent and his wife, Sarah Strong Vincent. Seven siblings were to follow, but only four survived their childhoods. Waterford is most noted for being the home of Fort LeBoeuf, the frontier outpost where a cheeky 21-year-old Virginian named George Washington delivered Great Britain’s ultimatum to the French in 1753, helping to trigger the French and Indian War.

The Erie County of Strong Vincent’s boyhood was a hotbed of abolitionism and a haven for escaping slaves. Runaways were hidden in “safe homes” in Waterford, Erie, and other places, fed hot meals, then concealed in horse-drawn wagons or spirited through the woods, eventually being smuggled onto Lake Erie ships bound for Canada and freedom

The Vincents, originally “Van Sants” as Strong Vincent biographer Hans G. Myers has documented, were prosperous Huguenots who fled religious persecution in France, arriving in the New World in 1687. His mother’s clan, the Strongs, had been in the colonies even longer: they were direct descendants of the Puritan settlers of Massachusetts Bay. Strong Vincent’s great-great-great grandfather, the felicitously named “Elder John” Strong, was born in Somerset, England, around 1605. He emigrated to Massachusetts in the 1630s and lived another seven decades, purportedly fathering 18 children with two wives!

Strong Vincent’s paternal grandfather, Judge John Vincent, made a fortune by establishing mercantile and freight routes through the wilderness between Waterford and Erie and later along the lake between Erie and Cleveland, exacting fees for the use of his roads, wagons, and vessels.

 His maternal grandfather, Captain Martin Strong, grew up on the family farm in Connecticut before moving to New York State’s Genessee Valley, where he mastered the science of land surveying. In 1795, after surviving a harrowing trip on horseback, he moved to Presque Isle, a peninsula jutting into Lake Erie. For much of his journey, he had to look out for highwaymen and rogue Iroquois warriors.

Martin Strong soon became northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading territorial surveyor, eventually acquiring huge tracts of land, becoming a Waterford/Erie power broker and an intimate of John Vincent. When John Vincent routed his Waterford Turnpike around Martin Strong’s property, Martin – no fool, he – cashed in by establishing a nearby tavern and tollgate. Martin Strong was also a leader in the local unit of the Pennsylvania state militia, which earned him the title of “Captain.”

John Vincent, meanwhile, despite his lack of formal education, was appointed a magistrate, obtaining the “Judge” honorific. When the Judge’s son married the Captain’s daughter in 1834, it was a major event in Erie County social and business circles.

That son, B.B., became an industrial entrepreneur in Waterford and Erie. By 1840, B.B. co-owned Vincent, Himrod & Co., a Mill Creek iron foundry that produced stove plates, scale weights, railroad spikes, and other necessities that fueled the 19th century economy. The acquisitive B.B. also founded a bank and served as a manager of the Erie Canal Company, the commercial enterprise behind the 360-mile-long New York State waterway, completed in 1825, that transformed the northern half of the young Republic by linking the eastern seaboard to the Great Lakes. 

Both families were devoutly Christian. The Vincents were pillars of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Waterford, where young Strong was baptized, and later of St. Paul’s Episcopal in Erie after B.B. moved the family to the fledgling city of some 45,000 souls in 1843. The Strongs, for their part, built an ecumenical place of worship on their Erie County farm that they christened “Union Church”; the family encouraged its use by all Christian denominations.

Boyd Vincent, Strong’s younger brother who became an Episcopal minister, recalled decades later what it was like growing up in a rigorously Christian household. “Bible reading, family prayer, study of Sunday-school lessons, strict Sunday observance, carefully regulated amusements,” Boyd shared in a reminisce unearthed by Nevins and Styple.

Close to six feet tall and weighing 225 pounds, B.B. Vincent was not to be messed with. “When [Father] said ‘Come’ we came, and when he said ‘Go’ we went,” Boyd wrote.

The Vincents and the Strongs were surrounded by – and in some capacity, almost assuredly part of – a secret network devoted to ending the scourge of slavery. Erie County historical societies and Myers, author of the 2022 book The Lion of Round Top, have chronicled that B.B. Vincent’s business partner, William Himrod, was for decades one of northwestern Pennsylvania’s leading abolitionists and a key “conductor” along the Underground Railroad that snuck escaped slaves into Canada.

Erie was the terminus, scholars say, for several branches of the Underground Railroad that tapped old Seneca and Delaware Indian trails. The Senecas’ ancient Brokenstraw Path, for example, went through Sugar Grove near the New York State line in Warren County before meandering around Corry, Union City, and Waterford in Erie County.

Many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves from the 1830s through the 1850s gained their freedom via Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York State Native American trails like the Brokenstraw. Sugar Grove became such a wellspring of abolitionism that the great Frederick Douglass, himself a former slave, spoke at an anti-slavery convention there in 1854.

Did the young Strong Vincent witness escaped slaves being hurried from one home to the next or rushed onto boats anchored along Lake Erie? Almost certainly. Were the Vincent homes in Waterford and Erie used as safe houses? We can’t know for sure, but given the family’s religious convictions and personal and political connections, it’s a distinct possibility.

Moreover, young Vincent would have heard the Underground Railroad discussed at length at family and church gatherings, especially after slave catchers and federal marshals, emboldened by the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it a serious federal crime to harbor or aid escaped slaves, began harassing activists like his father’s close friend and business partner.

*

Photography was still in its relative infancy when war broke out in 1861. Picture-making was so primitive that it’s hard to distinguish one Civil War portrait from the next. Whether Reb or Yank, they’re eerily similar: the soldier stuck a hand in his uniform pocket, or inside open coat buttons, and struck a menacing pose – body erect, eyes narrow, mouth unsmiling.

The evolving insignias and epaulets affixed to Vincent’s uniform in one portrait shot after another reflect his promotions through the ranks, from second lieutenant all the way up to colonel in just over two years. There’s no photograph of Vincent as a brigadier general, since he was given that final honor as he lay dying in a Gettysburg farmhouse that, like scores of other dwellings in and around that benighted village, had been turned into an emergency hospital.

His friends recalled that Vincent took great pride in his muttonchop side whiskers; they were so thick and luxurious that they almost met under his chin. At least when having his portrait taken, Vincent kept his lower jaw and upper lip cleanly shaven.

Since a host of eyewitnesses – superiors, subordinates, even enemies – attested to Vincent’s courage, not just at Gettysburg but in earlier encounters, it’s easy more than a century and a half later to consider his Revolutionary War lineage, study the forbidding aura captured in photographs, and perceive greatness.

“There’s no doubt about it,” we tell ourselves. “This young man was destined to lead soldiers in battle.”

But was he?

*

In truth, there was little in Vincent’s boyhood to suggest future battlefield genius. As a youngster at Erie Academy, he was an indifferent student. To teach his 14-year-old son a lesson, his father let Strong leave school to work in the family foundry. After toiling for a few weeks around a red-hot furnace, Strong and B.B. decided the young man’s talents would be better suited to the foundry’s counting room. At a tender age, he began overseeing much of the factory’s labor force, report Nevins and Styple.

Within a couple of years, the Vincents realized that the youngster needed a stronger technical education to help grow the family business. At age 17, he entered the Scientific School at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, then run by his family’s lodestar, the Episcopal Church.

His academic records at Trinity have not survived, but his time in Hartford had its share of controversy. As a sophomore, Vincent began courting Lizzie, Miss Elizabeth Carter, a teacher at Miss Porter’s finishing school in Farmington that – scandalously for that era – taught its female students actual academic subjects, not just social niceties. On one of Vincent’s visits, a security guard at the school apparently said something disparaging about his lady friend – or at least Vincent interpreted the remark as such. It violated Vincent’s code of chivalry, which back in the 19th century was grounds for fisticuffs – and often much worse. Vincent proceeded to pummel the man, which got him into Dutch with Trinity’s Episcopal leadership.

Vincent either was expelled or decided to leave Trinity of his own volition – it’s unclear. Either way, he ended up transferring to Harvard. But instead of entering the Massachusetts school as a junior, he chose – or more likely, Harvard chose for him – to begin his career in Cambridge as a sophomore, essentially “repeating” a grade.

“In light of the event that precipitated his departure from Trinity, it is not known how Vincent managed his way into Harvard,” Nevins and Styple observed, before drolly adding: “Of course, it is possible that his father’s wealth may have made his Harvard welcome more cordial.”

Regardless of the circumstances surrounding his admission, Vincent made his mark at Harvard. Contemporaries remember him as a popular figure around campus, a young man whose commanding baritone could be heard from one end of Harvard Yard to the other.

“He looked many years older than he really was, and in every respect his mind corresponded to his body,” a classmate recalled. “One would have said, on hearing him converse, that he was twenty-five years old.”

But old habits die hard. He was still a middling student, although his grades improved as graduation neared. His final rank in the class of ’59 was squarely in the center – 46th out of 92 students. Vincent’s files also reveal that he was regularly reprimanded for skipping prayer sessions and for indulging his tobacco habit on the grounds.

He continued to court Lizzie through his Cambridge years. The couple became engaged at some point in 1860, after he returned to Erie to study law under the tutelage of William S. Lane, one of the area’s most successful attorneys.

B.B. Vincent, as historian Myers has revealed, served as a delegate to the 1860 Republican convention that surprised many by nominating former Congressman Abraham Lincoln of Illinois instead of Senator William H. Seward of New York. Strong Vincent then joined his father in campaigning hard for the Railsplitter that fall against Democratic nominee Stephen Douglas and a host of other contenders in what proved to be an incendiary election. The Vincents’ work paid off: Lincoln romped to victory in Erie County with more than seventy percent of the vote and carried the commonwealth with room to spare.

                                                            *

Even before the new president formally asked for volunteers to combat the South’s move toward secession, militia units sprung up all over Pennsylvania, including one originally known as the Wayne Guards in Erie County. Radical separatists began firing on Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor at dawn on April 12, 1861. As soon as he heard of South Carolina’s belligerence, Strong Vincent – according to the research of George Deutsch, the former executive director of the Erie County Historical Society – joined what was now called the “Erie Regiment,” a 90-day enlistment unit organized by Colonel John W. McLane, an Erie native and veteran of the Mexican War. Although transferred to Pittsburgh to be closer to the early fighting in Virginia, the Erie Regiment missed First Bull Run and disbanded before seeing any action. McLane and Vincent, a newly commissioned second lieutenant, then organized a new northwestern Pennsylvania unit that ultimately became the 83rd Regiment. It stayed in the war for the duration.

Vincent persuaded Lizzie that they should get married before he was sent to the front lines. They were wed on April 25, 1861, at the Reformed Dutch Church in her family’s hometown, Jersey City, New Jersey. A week after the ceremony, Vincent was promoted to first lieutenant.

Oliver Norton, the bugler from Erie County, was among the 83rd’s early enlistees. “My first impression of [Vincent] was not favorable,” Norton recalled in his memoirs. “I thought him a dude and an upstart.”

But Norton’s perspective changed once he saw the first lieutenant in action on the drill field. “I soon came to know that he wished to impress on that mob of green country boys, by example as well as precept, the proper way for a soldier to stand and move. It was the beginning for the regiment of a military education.”

Vincent’s own military education was strengthened that fall by a series of tutorials on maneuvers and tactics taught by Colonel McLane. McLane’s protégé became such a stickler for detail and preparation that some of his charges viewed him as a martinet. On George Washington’s 130th birthday in February of ’62, Vincent read aloud to the regiment Washington’s famous Farewell Address.

Norton was far from the only private who worried that a well-bred “gentleman” like Vincent might cower when commanding men in battle. But it didn’t take long for Norton and comrades to recognize that Vincent could translate his insistence on discipline into effective action on the battlefield.

Another member of the 83rd who developed an intimate relationship with Vincent was the regiment’s eventual adjutant, First Lieutenant John M. Clark. Clark had been born in 1837 in Meadville, a village of some 3,000 people forty miles due south of Erie in Crawford County. He was 24-years-old when he signed up for the Erie Regiment and then re-upped with the 83rd. His father was a Scottish immigrant who’d moved his brood from a Connecticut farm to northwestern Pennsylvania. The elder Clark continued to farm in Meadville and also served as a justice of the peace. His son John studied at Allegheny College and clerked for an iron foundry and a pair of grocery establishments in Erie County before the war broke out.

Once the Erie Regiment was disbanded, word circulated in the area that Colonel McLane was organizing a new three-year enlistment outfit. A host of men from Warren County, for example, traveled to Erie to sign up in July and August. Some made the 60-mile trip by horse or horsedrawn wagon; others rode the Sunbury and Erie Rail Road, which had inaugurated passenger service in Warren two years earlier. Most of the Warren County men who joined what soon became the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment were assigned by McLane and Vincent to serve in Companies A and D.

Clark was among the Crawford Countians assigned to Company I. Soon enough, Second Lieutenant Clark became First Lieutenant. It appears he was elevated to regimental adjutant in the aftermath of the Gaines’ Mill melee in June of ’62. After Vincent became the 83rd’s head that fall, Clark became his right-hand man.

Vincent must have had implicit faith in the Scottish-American. Clark served as Vincent’s chief administrative and personnel officer. It was Clark’s job to manage Vincent’s paperwork and to ensure that orders from the brigade and divisional command were promptly carried out.

The Vincent-Clark partnership worked well in one battlefield crisis after another, especially during the nightmarish assault on – and retreat from – Marye’s Heights at Fredericksburg. Miraculously, both emerged more or less unscathed from one of the war’s most horrific killing fields.

                                                            *

The 83rd was officially mustered into service in September 1861, with McLane as its commanding officer and Vincent as his top aide. Most of its first year was spent in training, often in concert with its Third Brigade compatriot, the Albany-based 44th New York Infantry. The two regiments became so closely linked that they became known as “Butterfield’s Twins,” after their brigade and eventual division commander, General Butterfield, Oliver Norton’s songwriting partner.

The Twins’ baptism under fire came, sadly, in May and June of ‘62 in and around Hanover Court House, Virginia, amid Major General George McClellan’s ill-fated Peninsula Campaign. The Twins and other Union regiments were routed at Gaines’ Mill in what became known as the Battle of the Seven Days. McLane was killed in the Chickahominy wetlands along with five dozen other men from the 83rd. Two hundred more were wounded or captured.

Vincent missed the action at Gaines’ Mill because he had contracted “Chickahominy Fever” – a form of malaria that felled thousands of soldiers on both sides that spring and summer – and was confined to a field hospital bed. When Vincent got word that his regiment had been decimated, he defied doctor’s orders, jumped onto his horse, and raced off to Gaines’ Mill, arriving in time to see his bloodied men in full retreat. Vincent, still feverish, soon collapsed and had to be rushed back to the hospital. He nearly died, spending months in critical care. He was transported by medical boat to New York City, where he was met by his wife and father. The group then spent three weeks in Jersey City so Strong could be nursed at Lizzie’s family home. He improved enough to be taken home to Erie to continue his recovery.

It wasn’t until October 1st of ’62 that Vincent could rejoin the 83rd. The men were then encamped in Sharpsburg, Maryland, where most had been held in reserve at the Battle of Antietam two weeks earlier. Vincent was viewed in such high esteem that, even in his absence, the soldiers of the 83rd elected him their regimental commander.

Two months later at Fredericksburg, Vincent vindicated their faith. Once the Union high command realized its attack had failed, Vincent did a masterful job guiding his men off Marye’s Heights on a bitterly cold December night. He waited until the moon had been obscured by a cloud before ordering the retreat, undoubtedly saving many lives.

The men in the 83rd and other Third Brigade regiments had been so eviscerated at Fredericksburg that many were kept off of Chancellorsville’s front lines in early May of ’63. By the time it began marching north six weeks later for what became the Gettysburg campaign, the brigade had been refortified with men and equipment – and, as of June 28, had itself a new commanding officer.

Earlier that year, lawyer Vincent was offered the position of Judge Advocate for the Union Army. He turned down the appointment, telling his superiors that he had joined the military to fight, not litigate.

The magnitude of what was at stake brought out something in Vincent he may not have known he had. Raised in a strict Episcopal household and educated at Trinity and Harvard, he prided himself not only on his knowledge of history and literature but his grasp of moral urgency.

“Surely the right will prevail,” Vincent had written to Lizzie when he left for war in 1861. “If I live, we will rejoice over our country’s success. If I fall, remember, you have given your husband to the most righteous cause that ever widowed a woman.”

Now read party 2 on how it all ended here.

Timothy M. Gay is a Pulitzer-nominated author of five books and dozens of articles about history and culture. His most recent book is RORY LAND, which looks at the life of golf superstar Rory McIlroy through the prism of Ireland’s troubled past. A graduate of Georgetown University, Gay grew up in Warren, Pennsylvania, the proud home of a host of Little Round Top heroes in the 83rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment.

The War of the Breton Succession: Edward’s Last Straw

The War of the Breton Succession, or Breton War of Succession (1341–1365), was a war over the succession to the dukes of Brittany, in north-western France, that lasted for over twenty years. The war was a major conflict in the long Hundred Years’ War, which drove both France and England into a fight for survival and a contest for supremacy in Western Europe. Talia Bega explains — and looks at what happened as the English kept winning – until they didn’t.

Part 1 on the origins of the war is here, and part 2 on the rise of the English is here, and part 3 on the rise of the English here, and part 4 on French Struggles Against the English at Crécy here.

The Battle of the Thirty (1350). By Octave Penguilly L'Haridon. Source: Public domain, available here. 

The Failures at Crécy

In 1346, Edward successfully invaded France in a large-scale campaign known today as the Crécy Campaign. Edward saw it as a chance to press deeper into a France already reeling, striking further into its territories.  At first the campaign was risky for Edward: supplies ran short and morale was low. At the time, Charles of Blois was facing challenges as Edward was still sending in reinforcements to help strengthen the Montfort claim to the Duchy of Brittany.

Charles knew what Edward was about to do and had no choice but to face the fight.  Instead of a war for succession, it was now a fight for the survival of France. Philip VI, the first Valois king of France, saw much of the country fall apart. In 1337, he watched Edward lay claim to the French crown, and knew a reckoning between them was only a matter of time. A few years later, John III, Duke of Brittany, died, causing the War of the Breton Succession. Philip had a chance to win at first, but as the years dragged on, French morale collapsed.  He kept sending in as many men as he could, but the defeats kept coming.

Philip asked Charles for support to defeat Edward, but the risk was considerable. After the French defeat at Crécy, Charles lost hope, and a year later he was captured at La Roche-Derrien.

Charles vs the Hands of the English

In 1347, Charles had one more chance to lay siege to La Roche-Derrien and recapture it — but he was captured in the attempt. The battle showcased the power of the English longbowmen, whose arrows had an effective range of roughly 200m. Longbowmen would prove just as decisive nearly 70 years later at Agincourt. As at Crécy, the French besieging force heavily outnumbered the English relief force, yet still suffered the heavier losses.  The French were also backed by Genoese mercenaries, who remained a key part of their forces throughout the Hundred Years’ War. Despite their numbers, the French seemed unable to learn from their repeated defeats. The battle also saw surprise attacks on Charles’ forces by townsfolk armed with axes and swords, who harried his men and the longbowmen alike.

Charles thought he had won after his initial charge succeeded, but the English rallied and turned the battle against him. Charles was taken prisoner — another decisive victory for the English. With Charles gone, Philip’s support in Brittany had collapsed, and the English were closer than ever to securing their claim.

Charles was then held in the Tower of London for years, and little is known for certain about the conditions of his imprisonment. At the time, the Tower served as a central political prison, a royal residence, and a site for coronation ceremonies. The French pope, Innocent VI, was alarmed by the conflict and pressed for a peace treaty.  It allowed both factions to hold part of the territory and maintain an uneasy peace.

At Last Victory

At this time came one of the most famous episodes of medieval chivalry: in 1351, the Combat of the Thirty.  It came to represent the very peak of knighthood and honor. Both sides had thirty knights each, and the French were led by Marshal of Brittany, Jean de Beaumanoir, and for the English, Robert Bemborough. It was part duel, part military exercise — not simply a show for entertainment. The arrangements were straightforward: Jean challenged Robert to a fight, and both men accepted.

The fight itself lasted only a few hours, with four French knights and two English dead by the time of a short break. Bemborough was killed soon after, followed by several more of his knights. The English were surrounded and defeated, securing a French victory that underscored the era’s ideals of chivalry. The casualties were nine dead for the English vs six for the French. Unlike a typical battle of the period, it was remembered above all as a display of chivalric ideals. Chroniclers such as Jean Froissart cited the encounter as an example of chivalry itself.

Though the Combat of the Thirty had little effect on the war itself, Edward signed the Treaty of Westminster in 1353, formally recognizing Charles as the rightful Duke of Brittany — though this recognition proved short-lived. If Charles could pay a large ransom and forge an alliance with England, the arrangement would hold. Edward also wanted the young John of Montfort to marry his daughter Mary, though this required approval from both the Papacy and France. Amid the struggles, the treaty was never enacted, and Charles was freed and returned as the rightful duke.

This moment in history raises many questions, but it also offers lessons. Edward was now in his early forties and physically weakening, but his mind remained fixed on the prize. The English enjoyed strong support on both sides of the Channel, which helps explain Edward’s deep investment in the treaty. Charles became a political pawn after his capture — and so, in a sense, did France, which faced its own struggle for power.

How could France decide its own fate now? With Charles restored to his rightful duchy, peace settled over Brittany — but not for long. Ten years later, a new claim to the duchy would rise, asking the same question all over again.

Now read the final part in the series on how the war ended here.

Bibliography

GRAHAM-GOERING, E. (2021). Princely power in late medieval France: Jeanne de Penthievre and the war for Brittany. CAMBRIDGE UNIV PRESS.

Sumption, J. (1991). The Hundred Years' War. University of Pennsylvania Press.

Henry VIII & His Wives: Part 7 — Catherine Parr: The Survivor

By the time Catherine Parr became the sixth wife of Henry VIII in July 1543, England had endured more than three decades of political upheaval, religious revolution, and dynastic uncertainty. The women who had preceded her had experienced exile, disgrace, execution, and death in childbirth. Catherine entered a royal court haunted by the memories of Catherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, and Catherine Howard. Unlike any of them, however, she would survive the king. Her story is not merely one of personal endurance but of intellectual achievement, religious influence, and political skill. As the final chapter in Henry VIII's tumultuous marital history, Catherine Parr's life provides a fitting conclusion to a saga that transformed England forever.

Terry Bailey explains.

Read part 1 on King Henry VIII here, part 2 on Catherine of Aragon here, part 3 on Anne Boleyn here, part 4 on Jane Seymour here, part 5 on Anne of Cleves here, and part 6 on Catherine Howard here.

Catherine Parr, attributed to Master John. Source: Public domain, available here.

Catherine Parr was born around 1512 into a respected northern gentry family closely connected to the royal court. Unlike many noblewomen of her age, she received an unusually broad education. She became proficient in several languages, including French and Latin, and developed a lifelong passion for learning. Humanist ideas, which had spread throughout Europe during the Renaissance, influenced her thinking and fostered an interest in theology, literature, and religious reform. Her education distinguished her from most Tudor women and would later make her one of the most intellectually accomplished queens England had ever known.

Before becoming queen, Catherine had already experienced much of life's complexity. She was married first to Sir Edward Burgh, who died after only a few years of marriage. Her second husband, John Neville, Lord Latimer, was considerably older and placed her in the midst of the political and religious tensions that marked northern England. During the Pilgrimage of Grace, the great Catholic uprising against Henry VIII's religious policies, rebels held Catherine and her stepchildren hostage while Lord Latimer was absent. The experience exposed her to the dangers of political instability and strengthened her understanding of the consequences of religious conflict. Following Latimer's death in 1543, Catherine attracted several suitors, including the ambitious Thomas Seymour. Yet circumstances—and the king's interest—would alter her future dramatically.

When Henry VIII proposed marriage, Catherine understood both the honor and the risks involved. The king was no longer the athletic and charismatic prince who had captivated Europe in his youth. He was aging, obese, frequently in pain from chronic leg ulcers, and increasingly suspicious of those around him. Yet Catherine accepted the proposal, likely recognizing both her duty and the opportunity to influence the kingdom's future. Their marriage took place at Hampton Court Palace on the 12th of July, 1543.

As queen, Catherine demonstrated remarkable political skill. She understood that survival required caution, diplomacy, and an ability to navigate competing factions at court. Unlike Anne Boleyn, whose rise had been closely linked to religious reform, Catherine pursued her beliefs with greater subtlety. She worked to reconcile divisions within the royal family, helping restore positive relationships between Henry and his daughters Mary and Elizabeth. Through her influence, both princesses were returned to the line of succession, a decision that would have profound consequences for English history.

Catherine's greatest political achievement came in 1544 when Henry departed for France on a military campaign. During his absence, he appointed her regent of England, entrusting her with significant governmental authority. The appointment reflected an extraordinary degree of confidence. As regent, Catherine oversaw the administration of the kingdom, signed official proclamations, managed finances, and coordinated preparations against a potential Scottish invasion. Her performance demonstrated that a woman could successfully exercise political authority at the highest level of government, even within a society that largely excluded women from formal power.

Her regency highlighted one of the central themes running throughout the story of Henry's six wives: the relationship between power and gender in Tudor England. Again and again, Henry's queens found themselves navigating a system designed by men yet dependent upon women to secure dynastic stability. Catherine Parr's success showed that women could exercise authority effectively when given the opportunity, although such opportunities remained rare and precarious.

Religion, another recurring theme throughout Henry's reign, played a crucial role in Catherine's life. By the 1540s, England's religious transformation remained incomplete. Henry had broken with Rome and established royal supremacy over the Church, yet many traditional Catholic practices remained intact. Catherine increasingly sympathized with Protestant reformers who sought further changes. She encouraged the reading of scripture, sponsored religious discussion, and surrounded herself with scholars who supported reformist ideas.

Unlike her predecessors, Catherine was also an author. She became the first English queen to publish works under her own name. Her devotional writings reflected both her personal faith and the growing influence of Protestant thought. Through books such as Prayers or Meditations and later The Lamentation of a Sinner, she contributed to the spread of religious ideas during a critical period in England's spiritual transformation.

Yet Catherine's religious interests nearly proved fatal. Conservative opponents at court, alarmed by her reformist sympathies, sought to undermine her position. They convinced Henry that the queen's theological discussions bordered on heresy. In 1546, an arrest warrant was reportedly prepared, and Catherine suddenly found herself facing a danger familiar to several of Henry's previous wives.

Her response revealed the political intelligence that had enabled her survival. Learning of the king's displeasure, Catherine approached Henry with humility and tact. She explained that their theological debates had never been intended to challenge his authority but merely to distract him from his physical suffering and allow him to display his superior knowledge. Henry, pleased by her submission and perhaps genuinely reassured, accepted her explanation. When officials later arrived to arrest her, the king angrily dismissed them. Catherine had narrowly escaped the fate that had consumed Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard.

The incident illustrates the continuing intersection of marriage and politics within the Tudor court. Henry's queens were never simply wives. Their relationships with the king carried profound political, religious, and national consequences. Catherine's ability to survive where others had fallen reflected not only good fortune but a sophisticated understanding of power and personality.

By the final years of Henry's life, Catherine had effectively become both wife and nurse. The king's health deteriorated steadily, and his once formidable energy faded. Catherine provided companionship and care during a period marked by physical decline and growing isolation. Her experience offered a striking contrast to the youthful romance that had characterized Henry's early marriages. The king who had once dazzled Europe now depended increasingly upon the support of the woman who would become his final queen.

Henry VIII died on the 28th of January, 1547. After years of political danger, Catherine Parr had achieved what none of her predecessors except Anne of Cleves had managed: she survived her marriage to the king. Yet her story did not end there. Freed from her royal obligations, she quickly married her long-time admirer Thomas Seymour. The marriage, however, proved less happy than she may have hoped. Seymour's ambition and questionable conduct created tensions within the household, particularly concerning the young Princess Elizabeth.

In 1548, Catherine became pregnant for the first time. At approximately thirty-six years of age, she gave birth to a daughter, Mary Seymour. Tragically, complications followed. Like Jane Seymour before her, Catherine died from puerperal fever shortly after childbirth. The woman who had survived Henry VIII ultimately succumbed to one of the era's most common dangers.

Despite her relatively brief period as queen, Catherine Parr's legacy was immense. Her influence upon Elizabeth was especially significant. Through her encouragement of education, learning, and religious inquiry, she helped shape the intellectual development of the future queen. Elizabeth would later become one of England's most successful monarchs, and many historians see Catherine's household as an important influence on her formation.

Catherine also left a lasting mark on England's religious development. Her support for reform helped sustain Protestant ideas during a transitional period, contributing to changes that would accelerate under Edward VI and become firmly established during Elizabeth's reign. In this sense, religion remained both a cause and consequence of the events surrounding Henry's marriages, just as it had throughout the series.

Looking across the lives of all six wives, Catherine Parr serves as a fitting conclusion to the story. Catherine of Aragonrepresented the old medieval order and the international power of Catholic Europe. Anne Boleyn helped trigger the English Reformation. Jane Seymour secured the long-awaited male heir. Anne of Cleves demonstrated the realities of international diplomacy. Catherine Howard exposed the dangers of youth and courtly intrigue. Catherine Parr brought together the lessons of all who came before her, combining intelligence, caution, political skill, and resilience.

Her story also mirrors the evolution of Henry VIII himself. The young king who had sought glory, romance, and dynastic certainty became an aging monarch preoccupied with control, security, and legacy. Through six marriages, England witnessed not only the transformation of a king but also the emergence of a new political and religious order.

The long-term impact upon the English monarchy was profound. Henry's marital decisions reshaped the succession, altered England's relationship with Europe, transformed the national church, and redefined the powers of the crown. Catherine Parr helped ensure that the next generation of Tudor rulers inherited not only a kingdom but also the educational and intellectual foundations necessary to govern it.

In the end, Catherine Parr earned a unique place in history. She was not the most famous of Henry's wives, nor the most controversial, but she was perhaps the most accomplished. Scholar, author, regent, reformer, queen, and survivor, she stands as one of the most remarkable women of the Tudor age. Her life provides a powerful final chapter in the extraordinary story of Henry VIII and the six women whose marriages shaped the destiny of England.

Needless to say, in many respects, Catherine Parr's life encapsulates the triumphs, tragedies, and transformations that defined the Tudor age. She entered Henry VIII's court at a moment when England stood at a crossroads, shaped by decades of dynastic uncertainty, religious upheaval, and political change. Through intelligence, education, diplomacy, and remarkable personal resilience, she succeeded where so many before her had failed. Yet her significance extends far beyond the simple fact that she survived her marriage to Henry. Catherine emerged as one of the most influential and accomplished women of sixteenth-century England, leaving a legacy that would resonate long after her death.

As the final wife of Henry VIII, Catherine served not only as queen but also as mediator, counsellor, regent, scholar, and reformer. She helped restore unity within the fractured royal family, supported the education of the future rulers of England, and demonstrated that a woman could exercise authority with competence and wisdom at the highest levels of government. Her regency during Henry's absence in France remains one of the clearest examples of female political leadership in Tudor England, while her published writings established her as a pioneering voice in English religious and intellectual life.

The story of Catherine Parr also highlights the extraordinary challenges faced by women in positions of power during the sixteenth century. Throughout Henry's reign, each queen was expected to fulfil multiple roles simultaneously: wife, political partner, dynastic safeguard, and symbol of royal legitimacy. Success in one area offered no guarantee of security in another. Catherine understood these dangers better than anyone. Her survival was not merely the result of fortune but of careful judgement, emotional intelligence, and an acute understanding of the volatile court in which she lived. She recognized that influence often depended not on confrontation but on persuasion, patience, and strategic restraint.

Viewed within the broader narrative of Henry VIII's six marriages, Catherine Parr represents the culmination of a remarkable historical journey. Each queen contributed in some way to the remaking of England. Catherine of Aragon embodied the old order of Catholic Europe; Anne Boleyn helped unleash the forces of religious revolution; Jane Seymour secured the Tudor succession; Anne of Cleves reflected the complexities of international diplomacy; and Catherine Howard revealed the dangers of courtly ambition and youthful indiscretion. Catherine Parr inherited the lessons of all these experiences and, through her actions, helped guide England toward the future that would emerge under Edward VI and Elizabeth I.

Her influence upon Elizabeth in particular cannot be overstated. The future queen's love of learning, intellectual confidence, and commitment to religious moderation were nurtured within an environment that Catherine helped develop. Through education and example, she contributed to the formation of a monarch whose reign would later be celebrated as one of the greatest in English history. In this sense, Catherine's legacy extended well beyond her own lifetime, shaping the character of the Elizabethan age and the development of England as a Protestant kingdom.

The wider story of Henry VIII and his six wives remains one of the most compelling narratives in British history because it is about far more than marriage. It is a story of power, faith, ambition, survival, and national transformation. Through these six unions, England experienced a break with Rome, the emergence of royal supremacy, repeated succession crises, and profound changes in the relationship between crown, church, and people. The personal lives of the king and his queens became inseparable from the destiny of the nation itself.

Catherine Parr stands as a symbol of endurance amid uncertainty and wisdom amid turmoil. She witnessed the final years of one of history's most famous monarchs and helped shape the world that followed him. Scholar, regent, author, reformer, stepmother, and queen, she embodied many of the finest qualities of the Renaissance while navigating one of the most dangerous political environments in Europe. Her life reminds us that history is often shaped not only by kings and battles but also by those whose intellect, courage, and perseverance quietly influence the course of events.

The story of Henry VIII's six wives is ultimately the story of England's transformation from a medieval kingdom into a nation entering the modern age. Among those six remarkable women, Catherine Parr occupies a distinctive place—not because she was the last, but because she helped ensure that the legacy of the Tudor dynasty would endure. Through her influence on religion, education, government, and the next generation of rulers, she became far more than Henry VIII's final queen. She became one of the architects of England's future.

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Now read about the alleged secret seventh wife of Henry VIII here.