Reading Mark Turnbull's English Civil War

A review of the Rebellion Series and 'Charles I's Private Life'

Robert Dalzell, 1st Earl of Carnwath, turns Charles I back from his impulse to lead a doomed charge at the Battle of Naseby. Royalist fortunes never recovered

The beginning of the end of the Royalist army is the beginning of Mark Turnbull’s story. The King’s Spy, first book in his novel trilogy set during the English Civil Wars, begins with Captain Maxwell Walker fighting the New Model Army at the Battle of Naseby.

Losing the day despite his heroism, Walker encounters Gervase Harper, the Roundhead who killed his wife. As King Charles I retreats, he entrusts Walker with a mission to retrieve his private papers.

Over the next two novels, while the Second Civil War breaks out in The King’s Captain and the Royalist cause is extinguished in The King’s Spy, Captain Walker’s character motivation changes from revenge to honor.

Along the way, he experiences the military conflict in Zelig-like fashion, alternately captured and pressed into service in a siege, or escaping only to be charged with murder by an enemy at court. Turnbull has written a historical romance with tropes that are familiar to the genre.

Which is not to complain about the perfect rhythm of Mr. Turnbull’s books. On the contrary, reading audiences prefer romance fiction that meets expectations, which is why romance novels are some of the most format-driven in all of literature.

Turnbull has everything happening right on schedule: main plots begin to resolve exactly halfway through each book, Maxwell’s last encounter with his main villain is two-thirds of the way through the second book, he rages at his wife’s murder in the first book and moves on in the third, and so on. An experienced romance reader will find everything happening right when they expect it to happen.

Turnbull evokes the scene at Naseby from Maxwell’s perspective, which cannot view the entire battlefield, but can witness enough to tell the story. He puts Maxwell in a cell at Hereford Castle, under siege by a Scottish army, to be impressed into counter-mine digging. Maxwell meets Louisa, the temptress, exactly three-quarters of the way through book two, and so on.

Turnbull shifts perspective in a few chapters, for example when Jane Whorwood, lover to Charles I, meets the astrologer William Lilly in the third chapter of the final book. These few chapters all impact Maxwell directly, for example by involving him in Whorwood’s conspiracy to free the king from his imprisonment by using acid on a castle window bar.

While this plot was real, the real William Lilly was also a parliamentary informant who quickly snitched on Whorwood, and it came to nothing. Turnbull imagines Maxwell carrying out the mission, his fear of discovery, the disappointment when Parliamentary troops preempt the royal escape. Real events become imaginary ones without breaking history.

Nor are the events which befall Captain Maxwell beyond belief. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms are replete with stories of capture, escape, recapture, and escape again. Likewise, captured soldiers regularly switched sides, sometimes more than once. Real adventures did happen, enough to inspire any number of romances.

If I have a complaint about Turnbull’s fiction, it is that he depicts the Roundhead enemy as one-dimensional. The books do not explore them in any depth, either as characters or as a cause. Perhaps that is forgiveable in romance novels, but it is insufficient as history.

Finally, let me praise Mr. Turnbull for his fight scenes. Real combat is generally swift and brutal. One-on-one combat should take place in paragraphs or two pages as it does here.

The descent into the mines at Hereford is gripping, with enough details to feel the claustrophobia, but it is also over quickly. Scenes and dialogues are concise, yet they still feel complete. Turnbull’s pen is sharp.

Turnbull is also the host of the CavalierCast, a history podcast about the English Civil Wars. I have now listened to three episodes that were quite good. Over 38 episodes recorded so far, Turnbull consults local historians, specialists in topic areas, and fellow novelists of the period to cover a wide variety of subjects related to the Stuart kingdom.

I do not know how many biographies of Charles Stuart have been published over the last three centuries, but the number must be dozens, at least. So why write another? “By focusing on his relationships, I hope to offer fresh insight into the man behind the crown,” Turnbull writes in Charles I’s Private Life.

The social world of Stuart Britain was indeed shaped by personal relationships, and the young king depended all too much on the wrong people.

George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, was a poor influence on the young Charles. His French wife Queen Henrietta was his abiding source of strength, but her Catholicism engendered the distrust of Protestants, while the marriage did not prevent war with France. His escapist affair with Jane Whorwood was a typical distraction from the crushing realities of his sovereignty, especially in the last year of his life.

The story of William Courteen is not included in Turnbull’s book, but bears mention in this context. Courteen was an Anglo-Dutch merchant investor and friend of Charles Stuart. During the 1630’s, the king’s interest in the Courteen cartel resulted in an embarrasing international scandal when an expedition interloped on the East India Company and pirated a pilgrim ship in the Red Sea. It was not the last Caroline initiative to result in backlash.

Charles Stuart endured a double blow when he lost both parents close together and inherited three kingdoms, Turnbull argues. Popular at first, the newly-anointed Charles I was unable to impose peace and harmony on his domains. Instead of stabilizing Scotland, three successive revisions to the Common Prayer Book in seven years proved one too many.

Financial insecurity defined his father’s reign and war would utterly bankrupt him. Unable to get along with Parliament, Charles Stuart found the material limits of his royal authority.

Among the courtiers who tried to shape Charles the boy, there was Gen. Edward Cecil, who wanted Charles to have his brother’s military mindset. His ally Dudley Carlton, ambassador to the Netherlands, bought the prince £1000 of toys, ‘models of artillerie and other necessaries for war,” to “make himself perfect in his chamber” for the battlefield and learn “the verie practice of everie thinge, either defensive or offensive.” Sadly, military weakness and “lack of ruthlessness” would define his rule.

The first sign of trouble came when he tried to taise 10,000 troops for the Palatinate, England’s Protestant ally in the Holy Roman Empire, which was descending into the Thirty Years’ War. They were judged “unruly and poorly armed” by observers. Naval expeditions to Spain and La Rochelle were costly disasters. At Newburn, his army was blown off the field by a far superior Scottish artillery corps.

England had avoided the great land wars of the continent for a century, but Turnbull writes that “as Britain finally bared its teeth to the world, they appeared rotten.”

Every good book reveals its argument halfway through. It is at the midway point of this biography that Turnbull begins to note the political actions of the London street mob. Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford, was the target of populist anger for the deteriorating situation in Ireland. London society threatened to withhold funding unless Charles signed the attainder of Strafford.

Here is where your humble correspendent, a specialist on John Fowke of English Civil War London, must inject him into Turnbull’s narrative.

Fowke was a key agitator in the City for the attainder of Strafford. He had in fact been a ringleader in the Tonnage and Poundage riots at the beginning of Charles’s reign, and in December of 1641 Fowke was instrumental in convincing Parliament to print the Grand Remonstrance.

Indeed, Fowke is strongly linked to both figures involved in the contest for control of the Tower of London in those febrile days: the Leveller John Lilburne and the soldier Thomas Skippon. Turnbull mentions this episode from the perspective of Charles I, but he does not examine the London revolution.

The business community had far too much money invested in the Irish plantations — and they did not trust Charles Stuart to put the revolt down properly, for he was too weak-willed. Fowke and his faction of London importer merchants used the issue of an army for Ireland to split the City from the king. This is all glossed in Turnbull’s biography of that king.

Turnbull writes about Charles divesting the Earl of Northumberland, Algernon Percy, of his office as Lord High Admiral. His deputy Robert Rich, Earl of Warwick, was an ally of Fowke’s business faction who still ensured that the Royal Navy joined the parliamentary side. Here again, the perspective of the king leaves out a great deal of context.

Turnbull notes the hypocrisy of the Self-Denying Ordinance followed by Oliver Cromwell’s exemption from it. John Fowke was the foremost agitator for a mass army from 1642, led the agitation for the creation of a New Model Army in 1644, and then in 1645 he led the agitation for Cromwell to command its cavalry, too. Fowke is on the other side of a remarkable number of episodes in this book.

As a co-chair of the Militia Committee and the Committee of Safety, a key fundraiser among the livery companies, as well as a tax collector, Fowke was essential to every aspect of care and feeding for an army. A haberdasher by trade, I suspect that Fowke may well be responsible for the choice to dress every regiment in Venetian red uniforms.

On the fateful January day in 1642 that Charles I walked into Westminster expecting to arrest five MPs for treason, Turnbull is focused on William Lenthal, the Speaker who fell to his knees. “I Have neither Eyes to see, nor Tongue to speak in this Place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose Servant I am here,” Lenthal said, according to the clerks of Commons.

Turnbull does not include John Fowke, who was also present in the House of Commons, despite not being an MP at the time. Fowke had “a saucy and insouciant speech” according to Samuel Butler. He expressed his hope that the missing men would be found and tried, “but in a Parliamentary way” (emphasis Butler’s). It was a pointed sting about the king’s justice because Fowke had experienced too much of it himself.

The five men that Charles sought that day were probably hidden at the home of Sir Isaac Pennington, John Fowke’s political partner. That residence was located on Coleman Street, the epicenter of radicalism in the City. An Independent on the Presbyterian question, Fowke was a consistent interface between City radicalism and the interests of his merchant community, which became known as the “new modelers” during the Commonwealth.

Which is all to say that as a scholar deeply read into English Civil War London, I cannot read Mr. Turnbull’s biography of Charles Stuart without seeing the parallax view of Charles from within revolutionary London. I cannot help but see in Charles much of what Fowke and the rest of the king’s enemies in London saw in their king: bravado, weakness, indecision, largesse, and pathos.

Charles Stuart was surely guilty of Arminian love for bishops, pomp, and ceremony, but these beliefs proved fungible in his negotiations with the Scots. History has found him not guilty of the various popish plots ascribed to his court by his enemies.

Focused on his subject, or perhaps unwilling to amplify the falsehoods, Turnbull actually understates the level of vitriol aimed at the king by Londoners, even as he argues that Charles was a victim of vicious propaganda.

Charles I’s Private Life does humanize its subject. “History has left him a two-dimensional tyrant or martyr,” Mark Turnbull complains. He prefers to draw us a tragic figure who endured relentless attack by his enemies. The slow, steady destruction of the loyal chivalric Order of the Garter marks the corresponding decline of the Royalist war machine.

It is a very good biography of one historically-significant king, though I hope Mr. Turnbull will do the same for some other figures of the period, or at least convince publishers that a market exists for books that are about English Civil War participants not named Charles Stuart or Oliver Cromwell.

Ismini Pells became the first modern scholar to write a biography of Thomas Skippon in 2021. That same year, Jordan Downs wrote the a detailed biographical sketch of Sir Isaac Pennington in Mobilizing For Parliament. Jessie Childs did the same with Sir Marmaduke Rawdon in 2023’s Loyalty House. Most of the new scholarship on revolutionary London has yet to show up on popular booskshelves. There is a hunger waiting to be fed.