The Newton family would not have shared Charles’s sympathy towards Catholicism, and indeed in later life Isaac was positively anti-Catholic.īy Newton’s own account, offered late in life, he was born premature. For many historians, the Civil War had its foundations in the decisions of Henry VIII and his immediate descendants and was as much to do with the ideological clash between Rome and the Church of England as with the position and powers of Parliament. Furthermore, the many complex reasons for the dispute included not only political preoccupations but religious issues, which for some would have been more important. There were many noblemen who fought on the side of Parliament, and many of the lower orders supported the King. This may have been so, but the sides in the Civil War were not defined clearly along class lines. They have based this opinion upon the family’s class and social aspirations, reasoning that, as upwardly mobile lower gentry, they would favour the status quo and disapprove of attacks upon the traditional monarchical system. Most biographers of Newton, from Stukeley to recent times, have assumed that the Newtons had royalist leanings. Within the space of a few years, England had been transformed from a nation at peace, existing beyond the turmoil of the Thirty Years War which had ravaged mainland Europe since 1618, into a nation in which brother had taken up arms against brother and lifelong friendships had been shattered by the taking of sides in the dispute – for the King or for Parliament. The battle of Edgehill, one of the most famous of the war, had been fought at the end of October and had gone the royalists’ way the country was gripped by battle fever. During the summer and autumn of 1642, what had begun as petty skirmishes and political and religious wrangling developed into full-scale civil war, with the royalists camped first at York and then at Oxford. His queen, Henrietta Maria, adored by her doting husband but loathed by many of his subjects, had been sent to Europe for her own safety. By the time Hannah and Isaac were married, King Charles I had left London, never to return as England’s acknowledged sovereign, and had headed north. The winter of that year was bleak both for the Newtons and for the country as a whole – England had slid into a savage civil war.
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