How the forces of militant Islam precipitated the English Civil War and changed England forever

Islam was the primary force behind the establishment of a constitutional monarchy in Britain

At school, we learned about the causes of the English Civil War, chief of which was a dispute about ‘Ship Money’. We know that this led to a struggle between the king and parliament and that this led in turn to a civil war, which resulted after a few decades in the country becoming a constitutional monarchy, where the main power in the land is an elected government, rather than the king or queen on the throne. Most of us though have long forgotten what Ship Money actually was and have no idea that it was inextricably linked to Muslim ambitions to conquer Europe.

In the 7^th century, following the death of Muhammad, the Middle East became almost entirely Muslim and later that century, North Africa was invaded and added to the Muslim world. Attention then turned to Europe, with the intention of converting that continent too to Islam. By 715 AD, the whole of Spain was in Muslim hands and the following year, the Portuguese city of Lisbon fell. Having gained a foothold in Europe, the time seemed ripe to ride north, just as the Muslim hosts had swept east and west, encountering no opposition which could not be brushed aside in short and bloody wars. In 720, a huge army of 90,000 Arabs crossed the Pyrenees mountain range and entered France. Over the next few years, the invading Arabs occupied a number of cities and thrust into the heart of the country. Then, in 732, they were halted at Poitiers and defeated by a Christian army. It was a turning point in world history, because it prevented Europe becoming Muslim as so many other parts of the world had done at that time. The Middle East, North Africa, Persia, Afghanistan; all have remained Muslim to this very day. The Battle of Poitiers though meant that Europe was, for the time being, destined to be Christian.

Europe was not however forgotten and even as Islam spread east into Asia, there was always the hope of invading Europe once more and adding it to the Muslim world. In the 16^th century, the centre of the Muslim world had shifted from Arabia to what is now Turkey, and the rulers of the Ottoman Empire turned their sights on the conquest of Europe. This was to be accomplished both by nibbling away at the Balkans and the kingdom of Hungary, by incursions on land, and also attacks on shipping and coastal areas in a long, drawn-out campaign which has been described as the ‘marine Jihad’. This war of attrition was conducted by Muslim ships which sailed out of ports in North Africa where the modern day countries of Algeria and Tunisia are now to be found. These privateers, seized ships and raided villages, carrying the inhabitants off and selling them into slavery. England suffered particularly from these depredations.

It seems almost beyond belief that this terrible period of British history could have been forgotten, but there it is. Let us look at some specific incidents from the time. Between 1609 and 1616, a total of 466 English ships were boarded and the crews taken to North Africa as slaves. In April 1625, three ships from Cornwall and one sailing from Dartmouth in Devon were captured by Corsairs and their crews taken. The following month, an entry in the Calendar of State Papers lamented that, ‘The Turks are upon our coasts. They take ships only to take the men to make slaves of them.’ Because the Barbary Coast was part of the Ottoman Empire, whose caliph was in Turkey, all Muslims were regularly referred to in England at this time as ‘Turks’. The bold seizure of English vessels was bad enough, but there was worse.

The Royal Navy not only seemed to be unable to protect English ships at sea, even those close to the coast, they could not prevent slavers actually landing and taking people onto their ships to be transported to the slave markets of Algiers. In August 1625, a raiding party landed at Mounts Bay in Cornwall. The villagers saw the ships at anchor and fled for safety to the local church, but this was not enough to save them. The slavers dragged 60 people out of the church, loaded them into their rowing boats and took them on board the waiting ships. They all ended up in the slave markets of North Africa. That month, on 12 August, the Mayor of Plymouth wrote to the Privy Council in London. He pleaded for assistance from the navy, because in 10 days, 27 ships had been taken and all the men on board, over 200 of them, had been made slaves.

All this makes strange reading today. We are familiar with the rout of the Spanish Armada by the Royal Navy in the late sixteenth century and yet now we see that that same navy was seemingly quite unable to protect the English coast from the depredations of a handful of pirates! The problem was, of course, that both the numbers of ships from the Barbary Coast of North Africa, and their type, made it almost impossible to deal with them in the way that one would a conventional, European fleet like the Armada. Even without James I’s neglect of the Royal Navy, the lumbering warships which had served England so well in the past would not have been much use against the raiders sailing out of Africa. This was essentially what is now known as ‘asymmetric warfare’, with small groups of ships darting in and out of British waters. The Royal Navy had large, heavily armed ships which would have been ideal when it came to conventional naval warfare, but they were not fast enough or sufficiently manoeuvrable to cope with these swift attacks.

Although we now describe the ships from Africa as ‘pirates’, that is not how they were seen at the time. With the Ottoman Empire gearing up for another assault on Europe by land-armies, the raids by ships from Algiers and Tripoli, could be better seen as probing attacks, which tested the ability of the European powers to respond to landings and attacks on shipping in their own territory. It must be borne in mind that these attacks on Europe from the sea were a counter-point to Ottoman expansion on land. During the seventeenth century the Ottoman Empire continued to grow at the expense of Europe, with new territory being swallowed up from Russia all the way to Austria and almost to Italy. With memories perhaps of the Muslim invasion of France in the eighth century, the sultans in Constantinople continued to press west into central Europe on land and to harry the coasts of Spain, France and England from the sea.

The boldness and frequency of the expeditions against the British Isles and other parts of Europe were really extraordinary. Sometimes, more than one ship would be attacked simultaneously. In 1634, two ships carrying goods from Minehead in Somerset to Ireland were attacked and the crews captured. At other times, the African ships would work like a wolfpack to take a ship which they had targeted. On 20 September, 1635, what were described as ‘six Sali men-of-war’ seized a ship near the Scilly Isles, which lie off the westernmost tip of Cornwall. The following March it was reported that 36 ships from England, Scotland and Ireland had been taken and in June that year three fishing boats containing over 50 men had been captured, ‘between Falmouth and the Lizard’. In August 1638 it was reported that ‘Turkish men-of-war of Algiers’ were operating in the English Channel.

The fact that the ships slipping in and out of British territorial waters were being described as ‘men-of-war’ is significant. This was the term applied only to warships and not generally to pirate vessels. The English at the time recognised that these raids were tantamount to an act of war and that the ships were really representatives of a hostile, foreign power; namely the Ottoman Empire. Just as English ‘privateers’ were used as a way by Queen Elizabeth of harassing enemy countries, chiefly Spain, with the possibility of ‘plausible deniability’ if they went too far, so too with the ships from the North African ports under control of the Ottomans. Referring to the ships which were raiding shipping around the British Isles at that time, one historian calls such piracy a ‘secondary form of war’

James I of England allowed the navy to become neglected and run down. When the Thirty Years War began in 1618, the Royal Navy was a shadow of what it had been under Elizabeth, in the days when it had defeated the Spanish Armada. By the time that James died and his son became King Charles I, the navy was hardly ‘fit for purpose’, as we would say today. Since the twelfth century, coastal towns in England had had a duty to provide fighting ships for the defence of the realm. Over time, this obligation had been replaced with a tax known as ‘Ship Money’. This meant that instead of actually building and fitting out warships, those in maritime towns paid the Crown to do so on their behalf.

Realising that he had inherited a navy in urgent need of overhaul and requiring many new ships to bring it up to scratch, Charles I decided to levy Ship Money not just upon towns on the coast, but rather on every county in England. Because parliament had not authorised this, the demand, made in 1628, was viewed unfavourably and abandoned after stiff opposition. It was not the end of the matter and in 1634, when he issued another writ to raise Ship Money, Charles decided to claim that he wished to strengthen the navy to protect the country from the attacks of the corsairs. In fact, the king had signed a secret treaty with Spain to join them in their war against the Netherlands; which struggle formed part of the Thirty Years War. Knowing that this would not prove popular with those who were being taxed, he concealed his true purpose in wanting to revitalise the Royal Navy.

Charles’ demand for money in October 1634 was limited to ports and required them either to provide a certain number of fully equipped warships or to supply the treasury with their equivalent cost in hard cash. To raise this money, the citizens of the towns would be taxed according to their means. This time, the Ship Money was a brilliant success and brought £104,000 into the exchequer. The following year, the tax was extended to the entire country and was for the sum of £208,000, which was also grudgingly paid. When, in 1636, the same thing happened once more, it was clear that the king was going to use Ship Money as a form of regular and general taxation.

Several high-profile court cases were heard which centred around the refusal of some individuals to pay Ship Money. In 1640, a group of citizens in London sent a petition to the king, stating their grievances. Heading the list was Ship Money and the petition mentioned:

The pressing and unusual Impositions upon Merchandise, Importing and Exporting, and the urging and Levying of Ship-money, notwithstanding both which, Merchants Ships and Goods have been taken and destroyed both by Turkish and other Pirates

Put plainly, they were saying, what is the use of our paying all this money for ships if the navy can’t even protect shipping from the corsairs? Two years later, the English Civil War began and the question of Ship Money, and by extension the raids by the corsairs from North Africa, was a major factor in precipitating the conflict between Parliament and the Crown. It was upon the ports that the burden of raising Ship Money first fell and they felt aggrieved that despite paying such vast sums to the exchequer, their citizens were still being captured and taken off into slavery. Little wonder that these cities chose not to back the king when the civil war began.

In this way, it may fairly be said that the English Civil War itself was precipitated by the Jihad being waged against Europe by the Ottomans. The land offensive culminated in the Siege of Vienna in 1683, during which the Muslim armies reached the heart of Europe, but by that time England had changed out of all recognition and a new constitutional settlement reached in which the power of the monarchy had been drastically curtailed. We have militant Islam to thank for this transformation.