Third English Civil War

Cromwell at Dunbar, by Andrew Carrick Gow

Date	1649–1651
Location	British Isles
Result	Decisive Parliamentarian victory, establishment of the Commonwealth of England

Belligerents

Parliamentarians

Royalists
Scottish Covenanters

Commanders and leaders

Oliver Cromwell

King Charles II of England
David Leslie, Lord Newark

The Third English Civil War (1649–1651) was the last of the English Civil Wars (1642–1651), a series of armed conflicts and political machinations between Parliamentarians and Royalists.

The Preston campaign of the Second Civil War was undertaken under the direction of the Scots Parliament, not the Kirk, and it took the execution of King Charles I to bring about a union of all Scottish parties against the English Independents. Even so, Charles II in exile had to submit to long negotiations and hard conditions before he was allowed to put himself at the head of the Scottish armies. The Marquess of Huntly was executed for taking up arms for the king on 22 March 1649.

The Marquess of Montrose, under the direction of Charles II, made a last attempt to rally the Scottish Royalists early in 1650. But Charles II merely used Montrose as a threat to obtain better conditions for himself from the Covenanters. When Montrose was defeated at the Battle of Carbisdale on 27 April, delivered up to his pursuers on 4 May, and executed on 21 May 1650, Charles II gave way to the demands of the Covenanters and placed himself at their head. Charles II now tried to regain the throne through an alliance with his father's former enemies in Scotland, who intended to impose Presbyterianism on England. He dismissed all the faithful Cavaliers who had followed him to exile.

As the Royal army was mostly Scottish, and as the invasion was not accompanied by any major rising or support in England, the war can also be viewed as being primarily an Anglo-Scottish War rather than a continuation of the English Civil War.

Ireland had been at war since the rebellion of 1641, with most of the island being controlled by the Irish Confederates. In 1648, in the wake of Charles I's arrest, and the growing threat to them from the armies of the English Parliament, the Confederates signed a treaty of alliance with the English Royalists. The joint Royalist and Confederate forces under Ormonde attempted to eliminate the Parliamentary army holding Dublin, but were routed at the battle of Rathmines by a Parliamentary army commanded by Colonel Michael Jones. As the former Member of Parliament Admiral Robert Blake blockaded Prince Rupert of the Rhine's fleet in Kinsale, Oliver Cromwell was able to land at Dublin on 15 August 1649 with the army to quell Royalist alliance in Ireland. The alliance, which was a compromise that gave command of the Irish Confederate forces to the English Royalists, was very shaky from the start, with many Confederates unhappy with the leadership of Ormonde. Indeed, the Confederates had fought a mini civil war among themselves in 1648 over this alliance, with Owen Roe O'Neill's Ulster army leaving the Confederation and only re-joining it after Cromwell had actually landed in Ireland.

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