A battle for England's soul

Civil wars are always the most brutal of conflicts - we have witnessed one recently in Europe which followed the break up of former Yugoslavia.

But, as I was reminded this week by re-watching the Channel Four series on the English Civil War, ours was no different, engulfing all strata of society and where the distinction between civilians and the military melted away.

And it was, literally, a battle for England's soul. Both sides thought that God was on their side - the king who believed that he ruled by divine right, his Puritan-inspired opponents who believed that everyone should, without the intervention of the clergy, be able to worship God in their own way. Both sides interpreted victory or defeat as the will of God, a sign of divine favour or disapproval.

It also showed the enduring interconnection within our islands - events in Scotland and Ireland intervened decisively in the conflict.

It was fought against the backdrop of the European "Thirty Years War", a brutal struggle between Protestantism and a Catholicism renewed by the Counter-Reformation. Rightly or wrongly, the fears of English Protestants about King Charles I's leanings towards Catholicism (his wife was a French and openly Catholic) were based on fears about what was being reported through the first stirrings of a popular media as happening to Protestants in Continental Europe - and Ireland

It was also a conflict about where the right to exercise power comes from - hereditary succession and narrow elites or the democratic legitimacy of a parliament? For England the answers did not come decisively until 40 years later, when the Glorious Revolution of 1688 enshrined constitutional monarchy as the system which has survived until today. And the horrors of the Civil War created a distaste for radical change which has nevertheless allowed the British political system to evolve over the past four centuries, though of course sometimes through conflict based on the need to address specific issues

It showed how, even amongst the Parliamentary side, there were deep divisions - the Levellers believed in a much greater equality in the social order than did army officers from the upper and middle echelons of society. Army and Parliament were often also divided - and there were a number of instances which endorsed Chairman Mao's dictum that "political power grows out of the barrel of a gun"

And one of the principles which lay at the heart of the conflict - "no taxation without representation" - inspired the American revolutionaries more than a century later

So many lessons for our own times and, in one satellite TV channel's very apt slogan, an important part of "Why we are who we are"