There are many phrases which have remained in popular use but whose original context, and sometimes author, has been forgotten. A good example is the stark depiction of life being “nasty, brutish and short”. Only recently this phrase was evoked to describe the likely career path of modern football managers. The man who coined it was correctly identified as the 17^th century English political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but what was the historical context in which it was made? It was the English Civil War. Simon Court explains.

Thomas Hobbes was writing during the turbulent years of the 1640s and early 1650s which saw a bloody military conflict between the Royalist supporters of King Charles I and his Parliamentarian opponents; the defeat of the King and his trial and execution, and the imposition of a Commonwealth in which the monarchy and the House of Lords was abolished. Whilst not directly engaged in this political upheaval Hobbes was horrified by it, and he sought to show in his political theory how the catastrophe of the civil war could have been avoided, and how future conflicts could be averted.

A ‘state of nature’

Hobbes had been developing his political thought throughout the 1640s but it received its most famous (indeed notorious) articulation in 1651, two years after the execution of Charles I, in his work Leviathan. Hobbes’ central idea is wonderfully simple. He contemplates what life would be like for people if they were not organised under a sovereign political power. He looks at them in this ‘state of nature’ and sees that they are driven by a common passion: a desire to be superior to others for the dual purpose of self-gratification and self-protection. This is of course impossible to achieve: all men cannot dominate each other. So they find themselves in perpetual conflict with a restless anxiety about the future. It is a bleak world where there is:

“continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

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When King Charles I raised the Royal Standard at Nottingham Castle on 22 August 1642 and declared war on his own people he did so with his customary appeal to regal pomp and circumstance. Yet the ceremony degenerated into farce as Charles made last minute corrections to the Proclamation which the Herald then had difficulty reading out, and when the Standard was blown down in a storm on the same night it was interpreted by many as a bad omen. This fiasco symbolised the incompetence which hampered the Royalist campaign, and compared unfavourably with the organisation displayed by the Parliamentarian military forces during the years of conflict. For after raising the armies and an indecisive period of hostilities, what proved to be the determining factor in the war was the command, discipline and conviction of the New Model Army. Simon Court explains.

Raising the armies

The Royalists (or ‘Cavaliers’) found it initially more difficult to raise funds and troops because it was harder to persuade men away from their harvest and towards a political cause which was purely reactionary and sought to defend the King’s absolute right to govern unfettered by Parliament. (Pictured: Charles I). By contrast, the Parliamentarians (or ‘Roundheads’) could appeal to the need to make the King more accountable to his people through their elected representatives in the House of Commons, and were also able to draw on the support of the English Puritans and Scottish Presbyterians whose religious conviction was that God was on their side. Both politically and religiously, the Roundheads were more highly motivated.

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