A contemporary depiction of Charles I's execution outside the Banqueting House, Whitehall, on 30 January 1649 -- the only time an English king was tried and beheaded by his own Parliament.

Watch a map of England redraw itself year by year between 1641 and 1651 and the color that keeps winning isn't a color at all -- it's exhaustion. Royalist red controls the west and much of the north through the early years, Parliamentarian territory holds London, the southeast and the navy, and the line between them lurches back and forth for the better part of a decade before the map simply stops needing a king in the legend at all. England spent eleven of those years, from 1649 to 1660, without one -- the only stretch in its history when the answer to "who rules England" was not a monarch's name.

The fuse was lit a year before the fighting started. 1641 was the year Parliament decided it no longer trusted Charles I to rule without checks, and it moved fast: it executed his chief minister, Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford, on 12 May after a treason trial; abolished the prerogative courts that let the king punish critics without a jury; and, in October, watched a rebellion break out in Ireland that handed Charles a plausible reason to raise an army -- and handed Parliament a reason not to let him control one. On 22 November, the House of Commons passed the Grand Remonstrance, a list of 204 grievances against the king's rule, by a margin of just eleven votes. Charles tried to arrest five of his loudest critics inside the Commons chamber in January 1642 and failed; by August he had given up on London and raised his royal standard at Nottingham instead. That was the moment the argument became a war.

The First Civil War ran from 1642 to 1646 and went badly for Charles largely because Parliament out-organized him. Its New Model Army, built and drilled by Oliver Cromwell and Thomas Fairfax as a professional force rather than a patchwork of local levies, broke the Royalist cause at Naseby in 1645 and pushed Charles to surrender to the Scots the following year. He might have kept his head at that point. Instead, defeated and in captivity, he spent 1647 and 1648 secretly negotiating with the Scots for an invasion on his own behalf -- a scheme that became the Second Civil War, was crushed within months, and convinced enough of Parliament's army that no settlement with Charles could ever be trusted. The army purged Parliament of the members still willing to negotiate with him, and what remained -- historians call it the Rump Parliament -- put the king on trial for treason against his own people. On 30 January 1649, he was beheaded outside the Banqueting House at Whitehall, the only English monarch ever executed by due legal process of his own state.

England became a republic, the Commonwealth, with no king in the picture at all -- until Charles's exiled son accepted a crown from Scotland instead and invaded from the north, triggering a Third Civil War that Cromwell ended decisively at the Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651. Charles II spent about six weeks afterward as a fugitive in his own country, according to well-worn tradition hiding at one point in an oak tree while Parliamentarian soldiers searched the grounds beneath him, before escaping to France in disguise. Cromwell ran the republic as Lord Protector from 1653 until his death in 1658; his son Richard inherited the job and lasted less than a year before the army eased him out, and by 1660 enough of the political class had decided that a restored monarchy was more stable than whatever came next. Charles II landed at Dover in May 1660 to be crowned, and the interregnum -- Latin for "between reigns" -- was formally over.

What the wars cost is easy to understate because England has fought larger wars since. Historians' estimates put combat deaths from the 1640s fighting at roughly 85,000, with total deaths -- including disease and its knock-on effects -- closer to 190,000 out of a population of about five million: nearly 4% of the population in England alone, and about 6% in Scotland. By the share of the population it killed, that makes the Civil Wars deadlier for the British Isles than the First World War would be nearly three centuries later. The map that shows Royalist red retreating year by year is really a map of a country arguing, for the only time in its history, about whether it needed a king at all -- and, for eleven years, deciding it didn't.

Sources: Wikipedia, "English Civil War," "1641 in England," and "Commonwealth of England"; Encyclopaedia Britannica, "English Civil Wars"; Charles Carlton, Going to the Wars: The Experience of the British Civil Wars, 1638-1651; Austin Woolrych, Britain in Revolution: 1625-1660.

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