Lord Strange at War

By the summer of 1642, James Stanley, Lord Strange, was already the most powerful man in Lancashire. His father, the 6th Earl of Derby, had retired from public life and was living in seclusion at Bidston Hall on the Wirral, having handed over the management of his estates and titles to his son. Strange had been the active Stanley for years. He had visited the Isle of Man in person since 1628, appointed its officers, presided at Tynwald on Midsummer Day in 1637, and styled himself "Sovereign Liege Lord of the Island" while his father was still alive. When the King summoned his nobles to York in May 1642, it was Strange who answered.

On 15 July 1642, months before the first pitched battle of the war at Edgehill, Strange rode into Manchester to secure the town's magazine of arms and powder for the King. He was refused. What followed was one of the first violent confrontations of the entire English Civil War. A contemporary letter described it as the "first stroke" and warned that "many a child will be Fatherlesse" because of it. Manchester had declared itself for Parliament, and the most powerful Royalist in the north-west had been turned away from its gates.

Strange came back in September. From 24 September to 1 October 1642, he besieged Manchester with what forces he could muster, but the town held. During that week, his father died at Chester. A contemporary tract noted the transition in parenthesis: "now Earle of Darby, for his father died this week at Chester." The new Earl withdrew on the Saturday at noon. Parliament had already ordered his impeachment printed on 16 September. The man who controlled more territory in Lancashire than any other single figure was now a declared enemy of the state.

What happened next set the pattern for the rest of the war. Derby delivered three regiments he had personally raised to the King at Shrewsbury, and the court took command of them from him. The family historian Seacome attributed this to "Envy, Jealousy, or Prejudice of some at Court." Whether the motive was jealousy, distrust of the Stanley name, or simple political calculation, the effect was the same. The Crown took the soldiers Derby had raised with his own money from his own estates and gave them to other commanders. Derby went back to Lancashire to fight the war with whatever he could scrape together on his own. The gentry who might have rallied to the King's banner under Stanley leadership watched the court slight their natural commander and drew their own conclusions. Ashton of Middleton, Holland of Heaton, Holecroft of Holecroft, Birch of Birch - men whose families had held land in Lancashire for generations - took commissions from Parliament instead.

Lancashire in Flames

Derby fought the war in Lancashire from his own resources and with his own men. He fortified Lathom House, his great seat in south-west Lancashire, and began raising troops at his own charge. When Parliament offered terms if he would change sides, his answer was blunt and final. His first engagement was at Houghton Common, six miles from Lathom, and he won it. From there he moved north. He took Lancaster by assault, leading the attack himself with a half-pike in his hand. He took Preston the following day. For two days in March 1643, Derby looked like the commander the King needed in the north-west.

It did not last. The forces against him were larger, better supplied, and growing. By June 1643, Derby had lost Lancashire. He had sold Charlotte's jewels to fund the campaign and had nothing left to show for it. He sailed for the Isle of Man, leaving Charlotte to hold Lathom House and whatever remained of the Stanley cause in England.

The following spring brought the two events that would define Derby's war. On 28 May 1644, Prince Rupert arrived in Lancashire with a Royalist army, and Derby joined him for the assault on Bolton. The town was stormed after a failed negotiation. The Bolton Massacre killed hundreds of soldiers and civilians. Parliamentary accounts put the dead at over a thousand. The town would remember.

Two months later, on 2 July 1644, Rupert gave battle at Marston Moor near York. Derby fought there. The Royalists were destroyed. The defeat ended any realistic prospect of holding the north for the King, and it left the Stanley position in Lancashire fatally exposed. Knowsley fell. Lathom was besieged for a second time. At Naseby the following June, Cromwell's New Model Army destroyed the King's main field army, and the First Civil War ground towards its inevitable conclusion.

Charlotte's War

Charlotte de la Trémouille was the daughter of a French Huguenot duke, raised in the court politics of Henri IV's France. She married James Stanley in 1626 and became, in the course of the war, the most famous woman in Royalist England. The reason was Lathom House.

When Derby left for the Isle of Man in the summer of 1643, Charlotte stayed behind with a small garrison and instructions to hold. In February 1644, Parliamentary forces under Sir Thomas Fairfax invested the house. Charlotte refused to surrender. Fairfax was called away to other duties, and command of the siege passed to Colonel Alexander Rigby, who proved no more able to take the house than Fairfax had been. Charlotte sortied against the besiegers, captured their mortar, and held the garrison together through three months of bombardment and negotiation. Every summons to surrender was refused. When Prince Rupert arrived in Lancashire in late May 1644, Lathom was still holding. Rupert relieved the garrison and Charlotte's defence entered Royalist legend.

The second siege told a different story. In 1645, with Derby on the Isle of Man and no relief force available, Parliamentary troops besieged Lathom again. This time the house fell. Parliament ordered it demolished so completely that almost nothing remains above ground today. The place Charlotte had risked everything to defend was pulled down to its foundations. She eventually joined Derby on the Isle of Man, where she would remain until 1651.

The Island Under Arms

When Derby arrived on the Isle of Man in June 1643, he came as a defeated commander who had lost Lancashire, spent Charlotte's jewels, and committed himself irrevocably to a cause that was already failing. He came to an Island he knew well. He had been visiting since 1628, appointing its officers, shaping its governance through personal relationships built over fifteen years. But what he did after June 1643 was different from anything that had come before.

Derby fortified the Island's harbours. Gun batteries went up at Peel, Ramsey, Port Cranstal, and St Michael's Isle. The New Worke at Castle Rushen was strengthened. The fortifications at Kerroogarrow in Andreas and elsewhere around the north of the Island turned Mann into a garrison. These were built at Manx expense, by Manx labour, for a war the Manx people had no part in starting.

The land reform cut deeper than the fortifications. Derby compelled tenants to convert their customary holdings to leases for three lives. The instrument was not new - there had been documented rounds of lease conversion in 1506, 1609, and 1630 - but the compulsion was. Tenants who initially sought the leases because they commuted heavy customary burdens found that what their acceptance was later argued to mean was something quite different. The lease placed the power of renewal in the lord's hands, and the lord needed money. His English estates were lost, Charlotte's jewels were spent, and the straw rent - the ancient customary payment that symbolised the tenant's connection to the land - was revenue left on the table.

The man Derby relied on to enforce these changes was Edward Christian, the Island's senior military officer. Christian had served Derby since 1627 - first as Lieutenant and Captain, then as Sergeant Major from 1642. But when Derby arrived in person, the relationship changed. Christian was arrested in 1643, tried before the Keys on five charges including sedition, fined a thousand marks, and sentenced to perpetual imprisonment. He would not be released until November 1651, after the Island had fallen to Parliament.

For eight years, the Isle of Man was a Royalist holdout - the last territory in the British Isles still held for the King, long after the King himself was dead. Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649. The Island held on. The institutional machinery of Mann - Tynwald, the Keys, the Deemsters - continued to function, but it functioned under garrison conditions, answerable to a lord whose authority now derived from nothing except the fact that he controlled the castles and the soldiers inside them.

The Worcester Campaign

In the summer of 1651, Charles II crossed the Scottish border with an army and marched south into England. Derby sailed from the Isle of Man with a small force of Manx and English soldiers to join him. He left Charlotte in charge of the Island. It was the last time he would see it.

On 25 August, Derby's contingent was intercepted at Wigan Lane in Lancashire by Colonel Robert Lilburne's Parliamentary cavalry. The engagement was brief and devastating. Richard Tyldesley, one of the senior Royalist officers, was killed. Derby was wounded but escaped and reached the King. The force he had brought from the Island was destroyed before it could play any part in the campaign.

The Battle of Worcester on 3 September 1651 ended the English Civil Wars. Derby fought there. Charles II escaped the field and eventually reached France after weeks on the run. Derby was not so fortunate. He was captured in the aftermath, tried by court martial at Chester, and sentenced to death. Parliament chose the place of execution deliberately. On 15 October 1651, James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby, was beheaded at Bolton - the same town he had stormed seven years before, where the killing had been done in his name.

The Uprising

When Derby sailed from the Isle of Man, the people he left behind had endured eight years of garrison rule, compulsory land reform, and a lordship that had turned the Island's own institutions against them. The news of his departure was the trigger. William Christian - Illiam Dhone, Brown William - led the Manx people in rising against the Stanley garrison and surrendering the Island to Parliamentary forces.

The rising was not a sudden impulse. The grievances ran back years - to the tithes, to the straw conversion, to Edward Christian's imprisonment, to the loyalty oaths extended to constables, clergy, and schoolmasters, to the fortifications built at Manx expense and the garrison maintained by Manx hands. What happened in October 1651 was the climax of a condition that had been building since 1643.

Colonel Duckenfield crossed from Lancashire with Parliamentary forces to receive the surrender. Charlotte held out briefly in Castle Rushen and Peel Castle, then negotiated terms. The Interregnum on the Island had begun. Parliament appointed Thomas Fairfax as Lord of Mann, and James Chaloner eventually served as Governor. Chaloner wrote A Short Treatise of the Isle of Man in 1656, one of the earliest detailed accounts of the Island's laws, customs, and natural history. For nearly a decade, the Isle of Man was governed not by its hereditary lords but by Parliament's appointees.

The Reckoning

The Restoration of 1660 brought Charles Stanley, 8th Earl of Derby, back to the lordship his father had lost. With the Restoration came a reckoning. The men who had surrendered the Island to Parliament in 1651 were now traitors to the restored lord, and the 8th Earl intended to make an example.

The constitutional machinery of the Island was turned against the man who had led the surrender. Illiam Dhone was arrested, tried, and convicted. But the trial could not be won with the Keys as they stood. Seven of the twenty-four members were replaced before the proceedings began - men who might have resisted were removed and men who would convict were put in their place. The court that sentenced William Christian to death was not the court that would have sat if the Keys had been left alone.

The execution took place at Hango Hill, near Castletown, on 2 January 1663. The Privy Council in London reviewed the proceedings afterwards and condemned them. The trial had been conducted under Manx law but in violation of the Act of Indemnity and Oblivion that was supposed to draw a line under the Civil Wars. The execution was a Stanley act of vengeance dressed in Manx legal clothing, and the constitutional damage it did to the Island's institutions outlasted the men who ordered it.

The Keys had been packed. The Deemsters had been made compliant. The ancient court that had governed the Island for centuries had been bent to serve a personal grudge. When Parliament eventually turned its attention to the Isle of Man a century later, during the events that led to the Revestment of 1765, the institutions that might have defended the Island's interests had already been weakened from within. The Civil Wars had come to Mann uninvited, and the damage they left behind shaped everything that followed.

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The English Civil Wars touched every corner of the British Isles. Explore the people, places, and events that shaped the Isle of Man.