rival of Christianity; and its resemblance to the new religion, however superficial, made it, in spite of the scandalous practices which grew up around it, a stepping-stone to Christianity when the tide set in against paganism.
Authorities.—Grant Showerman, “The Great Mother of the Gods,” Bulletin of the University of Wisconsin, No. 43; Philology and Literature Series, vol. i. No. 3 (Madison, 1901); Hugo Hepding, Attis, seine Mythen und seine Kult (Giessen, 1903); Rapp, Roscher’s Ausführliches Lexicon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie s.v. “Kybele”; Drexler, ibid. s.v. “Meter.” See Roman Religion, Greek Religion, Attis, Corybantes; for the great “Hittite” portrayal of the Nature Goddess at Pteria, see Pteria. (G. Sn.)
GREAT REBELLION (1642–52), a generic name for the civil
wars in England and Scotland, which began with the raising of
King Charles I.’s standard at Nottingham on the 22nd of August
1642, and ended with the surrender of Dunottar Castle to the
Parliament’s troops in May 1652. It is usual to classify these
wars into the First Civil War of 1642–46, and the Second Civil
War of 1648–52. During most of this time another civil war
was raging in Ireland. Its incidents had little or no connexion
with those of the Great Rebellion, but its results influenced the
struggle in England to a considerable extent.
1. First Civil War (1642–46).—It is impossible rightly to understand the events of this most national of all English wars without some knowledge of the motive forces on both sides. On the side of the king were enlisted the deep-seated loyalty which was the result of two centuries of effective royal protection, the pure cavalier spirit foreshadowing the courtier era of Charles II., but still strongly tinged with the old feudal indiscipline, the militarism of an expert soldier nobility, well represented by Prince Rupert, and lastly a widespread distrust of extreme Puritanism, which appeared unreasonable to Lord Falkland and other philosophic statesmen and intolerable to every other class of Royalists. The foot of the Royal armies was animated in the main by the first and last of these motives; in the eyes of the sturdy rustics who followed their squires to the war the enemy were rebels and fanatics. To the cavalry, which was composed largely of the higher social orders, the rebels were, in addition, bourgeois, while the soldiers of fortune from the German wars felt all the regular’s contempt for citizen militia. Thus in the first episodes of the First Civil War moral superiority tended to be on the side of the king. On the other side, the causes of the quarrel were primarily and apparently political, ultimately and really religious, and thus the elements of resistance in the Parliament and the nation were at first confused, and, later, strong and direct. Democracy, moderate republicanism and the simple desire for constitutional guarantees could hardly make head of themselves against the various forces of royalism, for the most moderate men of either party were sufficiently in sympathy to admit compromise. But the backbone of resistance was the Puritan element, and this waging war at first with the rest on the political issue soon (as the Royalists anticipated) brought the religious issue to the front. The Presbyterian system, even more rigid than that of Laud and the bishops—whom no man on either side supported save Charles himself—was destined to be supplanted by the Independents and their ideal of free conscience, but for a generation before the war broke out it had disciplined and trained the middle classes of the nation (who furnished the bulk of the rebel infantry, and later of the cavalry also) to centre their whole will-power on the attainment of their ideals. The ideals changed during the struggle, but not the capacity for striving for them, and the men capable of the effort finally came to the front and imposed their ideals on the rest by the force of their trained wills.
Material force was throughout on the side of the Parliamentary party. They controlled the navy, the nucleus of an army which was in process of being organized for the Irish war, and nearly all the financial resources of the country. They had the sympathies of most of the large towns, where the trained bands, drilled once a month, provided cadres for new regiments. Further, by recognizing the inevitable, they gained a start in war preparations which they never lost. The earls of Warwick, Essex and Manchester and other nobles and gentry of their party possessed great wealth and territorial influence. Charles, on the other hand, although he could, by means of the “press” and the lords-lieutenant, raise men without authority from Parliament, could not raise taxes to support them, and was dependent on the financial support of his chief adherents, such as the earls of Newcastle and Derby. Both parties raised men when and where they could, each claiming that the law was on its side—for England was already a law-abiding nation—and acting in virtue of legal instruments. These were, on the side of the Parliament, its own recent “Militia Ordinance”; on that of the king, the old-fashioned “Commissions of Array.” In Cornwall the Royalist leader, Sir Ralph Hopton, indicted the enemy before the grand jury of the county as disturbers of the peace, and had the posse comitatus called out to expel them. The local forces in fact were everywhere employed by whichever side could, by producing valid written authority, induce them to assemble.
2. The Royalist and Parliamentarian Armies.—This thread of local feeling and respect for the laws runs through the earlier operations of both sides almost irrespective of the main principles at stake. Many a promising scheme failed because of the reluctance of the militiamen to serve beyond the limits of their own county, and, as the offensive lay with the king, his cause naturally suffered far more therefrom than that of the enemy. But the real spirit of the struggle was very different. Anything which tended to prolong the struggle, or seemed like want of energy and avoidance of a decision, was bitterly resented by the men of both sides, who had their hearts in the quarrel and had not as yet learned by the severe lesson of Edgehill that raw armies cannot bring wars to a speedy issue. In France and Germany the prolongation of a war meant continued employment for the soldiers, but in England “we never encamped or entrenched . . . or lay fenced with rivers or defiles. Here were no leaguers in the field, as at the story of Nuremberg,[1] neither had our soldiers any tents or what they call heavy baggage. ’Twas the general maxim of the war—Where is the enemy? Let us go and fight them. Or . . . if the enemy was coming . . . Why, what should be done! Draw out into the fields and fight them.” This passage from the Memoirs of a Cavalier, ascribed to Defoe, though not contemporary evidence, is an admirable summary of the character of the Civil War. Even when in the end a regular professional army is evolved—exactly as in the case of Napoleon’s army—the original decision-compelling spirit permeated the whole organization. From the first the professional soldiers of fortune, be their advice good or bad, are looked upon with suspicion, and nearly all those Englishmen who loved war for its own sake were too closely concerned for the welfare of their country to attempt the methods of the Thirty Years’ War in England. The formal organization of both armies was based on the Swedish model, which had become the pattern of Europe after the victories of Gustavus Adolphus, and gave better scope for the moral of the individual than the old-fashioned Spanish and Dutch formations in which the man in the ranks was a highly finished automaton.
3. Campaign of 1642.—When the king raised his standard at Nottingham on the 22nd of August 1642, war was already in progress on a small scale in many districts, each side endeavouring to secure, or to deny to the enemy, fortified country-houses, territory, and above all arms and money. Peace negotiations went on in the midst of these minor events until there came from the Parliament an ultimatum so aggressive as to fix the warlike purpose of the still vacillating court at Nottingham, and, in the country at large, to convert many thousands of waverers to active Royalism. Ere long Charles—who had hitherto had less than 1500 men—was at the head of an army which, though very deficient in arms and equipment, was not greatly inferior in numbers or enthusiasm to that of the Parliament. The latter (20,000 strong exclusive of detachments) was organized during July, August and September about London, and moved thence to Northampton under the command of Robert, earl of Essex.
At this moment the military situation was as follows. Lord Hertford in south Wales, Sir Ralph Hopton in Cornwall, and the
- ↑ Gustavus Adolphus before the battle of the Alte Veste (see Thirty Years’ War).
