In another thread, someone posted this really interesting link to [this article](https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/04/opinion/04tinniswood.html) about militiamen from Massachusetts fighting in the English Civil War. It mentioned a lot of interesting parallels between the Civil War and the American Revolution.
There were very few people living in the English colonies in America at the time so I don’t know how much influence the war would have had. On the other hand, the war was divided along religious lines as Cromwell was a staunch Puritan and Charles I was a Catholic and I know that the Puritans influenced a lot of early American history.
For those of you who don’t know much about the English Civil War, it was a war between Parliamentarians led by Oliver Cromwell and Royalists led by Charles I from 1642 to 1649. It started because of the King attempting to overrule Parliament by introducing taxes and raising an army without their consent.
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So I’m not really well read on the English Civil war although I know what it was about. I could only imagine that since the Monarchists won, there was probably an exodus of the Puritan Parliamentarians to the Americas and they thought maybe we can just try to make our own country here the way we wanted. And I do know that a lot of the ideas our founders got came from the times of the English Civil War and what the Parliamentarians believed in.
The English bill of rights was formed because of the English civil war, it went on to influence the founding fathers during the revolutionary war and both the US Constitution and US bill of rights take elements from it.
You might be interested in reading books and/or articles about [The Great Migration](https://www.americanancestors.org/publications/great-migration-study-project), written and published by [The New England Genealogical Society](https://www.americanancestors.org). They are experts in it.
Puritans fled there because they were imprisoned or even hanged for their religious beliefs and practices. That may also be in part because doing so flouted their monarch’s authority — in England the monarch is also head of the official church.
So it may have been as much about charges of ‘sedition’ as about religion itself.
Regardless, yes many Puritans fled and even helped found parts of the future U. S. I have Puritan, Quaker, and other early colonial ancestors.
We are not really taught about the English civil war in school.
Maybe in tony private schools but I was in the public school system. There were very good teachers but, maybe a different curriculum, I wouldn’t know.
There might have been one line said in passing to explain why pilgrims fled. That’s about it.
I learned about your civil war much later. I recall someone on the internet years ago, when I mentioned ‘the civil war’ (because in the discussion were Americans talking about American history) someone suddenly chided me with: “There was an English one too, you know. Everything isn’t about America.” sigh
So I ignored his tone and looked it up and then recently I looked at movies and documentaries about Cromwell and or Charles II etc. I’m still not that educated on it but, probably typical of most of us in that regard.
We are not really taught about the English civil war in school.
There was an English civil war?
There’s a fantastic history podcast by Mike Duncan called Revolutions where he covers various revolutions. The whole series is great, but the first two he covers are the English Civil War and the American Revolution. He will generally point out parallels/connections between different revolutions.
As that and the 30s year war were relevant to our Founding Fathers I would expect that is the main reason for Freedom of Religion in our Constitution.
I realize this is quite vague, but just as an example of a historical point an American would be dimly aware of, I recall reading that the US state of Virginia had a notably high proportion of Cavaliers/Monarchists.
In terms of how this affects later US history, when I’ve read accounts of the cultural differences between different regions of the 13 Colonies mustering troops for the Continental/Rebel forces against the British, the Virginians were described as being the most European in nature, in terms of the arrivals being groups of agricultural workers led by whoever was the richest landholder in their area. Basically that Virginia culture led them to have an almost feudal and aristocratic approach to mustering troops, whereas Massachusetts troops tended to be led by middle-class community leaders, and Pennsylvania troops insisted on holding elections to choose their officers.
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It in some ways had more of an effect on our Civil War. The Union was in the puritan founded North and inherited there views, while the Confederacy was based in the south, which had a more of the descendants of the royalists. Virginia’s nickname is the Old Dominion for a reason, and The Carolina’s are named after Charles I. Jefferson Davis, the confederate president was especially fond of connecting the two.