Civil wars are by nature bloody and brutal. The carnage of the 1860s in America, the massacres that accompanied the division of Pakistan and India in 1947, and the savagery of the more recent conflict in the former Yugoslavia are only a few among many awful examples. In this book Ian Gentles shows that the 1640s “Wars in the Three Kingdoms” in the British Isles were no exception. His assessment of the human and material costs of the wars does not go quite as far as Charles Carlton's Going to the Wars (London, 1992) but still suggests that even for England, the least devastated of Charles I's realms, the total casualties were at least equal, proportionate to population, to those of the killing fields of 1914–18. For Scotland, much smaller in both population and wealth, the impact was far worse, and for Ireland, repeatedly devastated by campaigns in which no quarter was given, the results were appallingly, unimaginably, worst of all.

There have been, as Gentles notes, other recent surveys of this conflict. His new one is justified, he says (4), because it focuses on the interactions between politics and military events; because it takes seriously the “thoughts” of the leaders of both sides; and because, as we have seen, it estimates the human and economic costs. These objectives are in fact accompanied by several others: one, as the title suggests, to integrate the histories of the struggle in the three component kingdoms; another to argue that the defining motivation of most of the participants was religion; and, finally, to put appropriate stress on the active participation of the common people.

Space precludes consideration of all these points, but let us start with the impact of military events on politics. Here Gentles is generally successful, although I have one important caveat. It is not surprising to find the author of The New Model Army (Oxford, 1992) engrossed by campaigns and battles, to which many pages, packed with detailed narrative and, as far as I can see, useful maps (I make no claim to military expertise), are devoted. If you want to know about the battle of Scarrifhollis (405), for example, this is the book for you. But on the politics Gentles is less sure-footed, particularly with regard to English parliamentary affairs. His narrative recapitulates the old two-party interpretation—war- and peace-parties down to 1645, Presbyterians and Independents thereafter—which I thought had been superseded years ago. If Gentles wants to resurrect it, he surely owes us an explanation of why he does so and why he rejects any alternative. He also gives a curiously monolithic impression of the Independents, repeatedly referring to them as “the Independent Junto,” as if only the leaders mattered.

But where the book most disappoints is in its treatment of the popular component, which falls far short of the author's original promise. Chapter 5 is entitled “Popular Allegiance in the English Civil War,” but its contents are a sad anticlimax, full of contradictions and uncertainties. The most astonishing is the omission of any serious treatment of by far the biggest popular movements in England and Wales during the entire period, the Clubmen, who receive only a three-line mention that does not begin to explain them, followed by an eight-line quotation (405). Gentles does of course repeat the obvious truths that people preferred peace to violence and disliked being plundered. But of the facts that the various Club movements had serious political structures and objectives, often connected with the 1641 Protestation, and that their attitudes to the two warring parties differed from region to region (they did not necessarily support the locally dominant side) we are given no inkling. There are no corresponding chapters on the popular dimensions of either the Irish or Scottish wars. We often hear in passing of the Irish and Scottish peoples’ involvement, but there is no systematic discussion of it. Why, for example, were there no outbreaks similar to the Clubmen in Ireland, where the peasantry suffered incomparably worse miseries than their counterparts in England and might have had correspondingly strong reasons for protecting themselves against all the warring parties?

This is not the only place where the book sidesteps critical historical questions. On religion, for instance: Gentles notes the overwhelming power of religion in determining people's allegiance, and who could disagree? But he offers no suggestions as to why some regions of England and Wales, for example, were more Puritan and thus more likely to be parliamentarian, than others. It really is not good enough to quote another historian's view (129 n. 2) that dismisses one proposed solution as “largely neo-Whig or neo-Marxist” (how can it be both?) without providing some alternative.

So this is an only partially successful attempt to write the history of the “War of the Three Kingdoms,” and it is hard to decide what is its anticipated audience: my teaching experience tells me that it is too detailed for undergraduates, too inclined to delve into historiographical issues unlikely to engage the general reader, and yet deals with matters that will be familiar (except for some of the military campaigns) to specialists and even to most graduate students. It would be a difficult assignment in any case, if only because of the tendency of many people at the time, particularly in England, to regard Scotland and Ireland as ultimately secondary in importance to the larger kingdom. One such person was Charles I. In a letter quoted by Gardiner (History of the Great Civil War, vol. 2 [1886–91], 105) reporting the extraordinary victory over the Campbells at Inverlochy in February 1645, the Scottish royalist commander, Montrose, directly appealed to the king: “Come thou thyself, lest this country be called by my name.” Going to Scotland might have enabled the king to delay, though probably not prevent, his eventual defeat. But Charles I did not really believe in “the British dimension.” As Gentles's unsparing account of the bloodshed demonstrates, however, this was indeed a British, not an English, civil war, and huge numbers of people were the victims of it.