Highgate in the English Civil War

A Strategic Hilltop

When the English Civil War began in the summer of 1642, the military significance of Highgate was immediately apparent to both sides. The village occupied the highest point on the Great North Road between London and Barnet, commanding views that extended for miles in every direction — south across the rooftops of London to the Thames and beyond, north across the fields of Middlesex towards the Hertfordshire border, east towards the marshes of the Lea valley, and west across the heights of Hampstead Heath. A military force holding Highgate could observe the approach of an enemy from any direction, and the steep slopes of the hill on every side made it a naturally defensive position that could be held by a relatively small garrison against a much larger attacking force.

The road through Highgate added a further dimension to its strategic importance. The Great North Road was the principal route between London and the north of England, and control of the road meant control of the flow of troops, supplies, and communications between the capital and the northern counties. If the king's forces, advancing from their headquarters at Oxford or from the Royalist strongholds in the north, were to threaten London, the road through Highgate was one of the routes by which they would approach, and the village's hilltop position made it a natural point at which to establish a defensive line. For Parliament, which controlled London and the south-east, the defence of the northern approaches to the capital was a matter of the highest priority, and Highgate, with its commanding height and its position astride the main road, was an obvious place to fortify.

The military assessment was straightforward, but the human reality was more complex. Highgate in 1642 was a small, prosperous village of perhaps a thousand inhabitants, a community of innkeepers, tradesmen, and gentlemen whose lives revolved around the coaching trade and the comfortable routines of a hilltop settlement. The coming of war disrupted these routines utterly, transforming the village from a peaceful staging post into a military position, with all the dislocation, danger, and hardship that entailed. The people of Highgate did not ask to be caught up in the great constitutional conflict that was tearing the nation apart, but the geography of their village gave them no choice: Highgate was too important to be ignored, and the war came to the hilltop whether its inhabitants welcomed it or not.

The Parliamentary Fortifications

In the autumn of 1642, as the Royalist army advanced towards London after the inconclusive Battle of Edgehill, Parliament ordered the construction of a ring of defensive fortifications around the capital. The London Lines of Communication, as they became known, were one of the most ambitious military engineering projects undertaken in England during the seventeenth century — a continuous circuit of earthworks, bastions, and redoubts that enclosed the city and its suburbs in a defensive perimeter stretching for over eleven miles. Highgate was incorporated into this defensive system as one of the outlying strongpoints that protected the northern approaches to the city, and the village was fortified with earthworks and gun positions that transformed its appearance and its character.

The fortifications at Highgate took the form of earthen ramparts and ditches, constructed by the labour of the London trained bands — the citizen militia that formed the backbone of Parliament's military forces in the capital. The earthworks were built across the principal approaches to the village, blocking the roads and creating killing zones through which any attacking force would have to pass. Gun platforms were constructed at strategic points, commanding the slopes of the hill and the roads below, and the existing buildings of the village — the inns, the houses, the chapel — were incorporated into the defensive scheme, their walls loopholed for musket fire and their grounds cleared to provide fields of fire for the defenders.

The construction of the fortifications was a remarkable communal effort. Contemporary accounts describe the entire population of London turning out to dig — men, women, and children, from the wealthiest merchants to the poorest apprentices, labouring side by side with the soldiers of the trained bands to raise the earthworks that would protect their city. At Highgate, the work was carried out with particular urgency, because the village's exposed position on the northern road made it one of the most vulnerable points in the defensive perimeter. The earthworks were substantial — deep ditches backed by high ramparts, surmounted by palisades and defended by artillery — and their construction required the demolition of some of the village's buildings and the felling of many of its trees to clear the fields of fire.

The Garrison

Once the fortifications were complete, Highgate was garrisoned by a detachment of Parliamentary soldiers who were charged with the defence of the village and the northern approaches to London. The garrison was not large — probably a few hundred men at most — but it was a permanent military presence that altered the character of the village in fundamental ways. The soldiers were billeted in the village's inns and private houses, their horses were stabled in the coaching stables, and their supplies were drawn from the local area — requisitioned, purchased, or simply taken, depending on the circumstances and the disposition of the commanding officer.

The presence of the garrison was a mixed blessing for the people of Highgate. On the one hand, the soldiers provided a degree of protection against the disorder and lawlessness that were among the most feared consequences of civil war. The countryside around London was plagued by deserters, marauders, and Royalist raiding parties, and the military presence at Highgate deterred the worst of these threats. On the other hand, the soldiers themselves were not always well-disciplined, and their demands for food, drink, fuel, and accommodation placed a heavy burden on a village that was already struggling with the disruption of its coaching trade. The inns that had once served travellers now served soldiers, and the income that the village had earned from the road was replaced by the uncertain and often resented payments of a military garrison.

The garrison's commander was responsible for the military administration of the village and for the enforcement of the various ordinances and regulations that Parliament imposed during the war. These included restrictions on movement, curfews, the prohibition of Royalist sympathies, and the compulsory attendance at sermons preached by the Puritan ministers who accompanied the Parliamentary forces. For the people of Highgate, accustomed to the relative freedom and informality of village life, these impositions were a constant source of irritation, and relations between the garrison and the civilian population were not always harmonious. The war, which was fought in the name of liberty and the rights of Parliament, brought with it its own forms of tyranny, and the people of Highgate experienced both sides of the conflict at first hand.

Local Families Divided

The English Civil War was, as its name implies, a conflict that divided communities, families, and friendships, and Highgate was no exception. The village's population included both supporters of Parliament and supporters of the king, and the outbreak of war forced these divisions into the open, transforming private opinions into public allegiances and peaceful disagreements into bitter enmities. The wealthier families of Highgate — the gentlemen and the prosperous merchants who had built the village's grand houses and who dominated its social life — were particularly likely to be divided, because their social connections and their political interests often pulled them in different directions.

The Royalist sympathies of some Highgate families put them in a difficult and dangerous position. Living in a village that was garrisoned by Parliamentary forces, surrounded by the earthworks and gun positions of the London Lines of Communication, those who favoured the king's cause had to be discreet about their loyalties. Open expressions of Royalist sympathy could lead to imprisonment, the confiscation of property, or worse, and the climate of suspicion and denunciation that characterised the war years made it unwise to trust even one's neighbours with political opinions that might be used against one. Some Highgate Royalists chose to leave the village, fleeing to the king's territories in the north or the west. Others stayed, keeping their opinions to themselves and waiting for the war to end.

The Parliamentary supporters in Highgate, by contrast, found their position strengthened by the war. The village's fortification and garrisoning placed them on the winning side, at least locally, and some of them profited from the opportunities that the war created — supplying the garrison with food and provisions, serving on the local committees that administered the Parliamentary war effort, or investing in the confiscated estates of Royalist neighbours. The war was not merely a political and military conflict; it was also an economic upheaval that created winners and losers, and the distribution of gains and losses was shaped by the accidents of geography and allegiance that placed some families on one side of the divide and some on the other.

The Impact on the Village

The physical impact of the Civil War on Highgate was considerable, though it fell short of the devastation that the war inflicted on towns and villages that were directly besieged or assaulted. The construction of the fortifications required the demolition of buildings and the clearing of land, and the presence of the garrison placed a heavy strain on the village's infrastructure — its water supply, its drainage, its roads, and its buildings. The coaching trade, which had been the mainstay of the village's economy for centuries, was severely disrupted by the war, as travel on the Great North Road became dangerous and unreliable, and the inns and stables that had served the road users were requisitioned for military purposes.

The war also took a psychological toll on the community. The constant threat of attack, the presence of armed soldiers in the streets, the enforcement of Puritan discipline, and the division of the village into factions and allegiances all contributed to an atmosphere of tension and anxiety that persisted throughout the conflict. The ordinary pleasures and routines of village life — the fairs, the markets, the social gatherings at the inns — were curtailed or suppressed by the demands of the war, and the bonds of neighbourliness and community that had held the village together were strained by the political divisions that the conflict exposed.

The material losses of the war were compounded by the financial demands that Parliament imposed on its supporters. The costs of fortification, garrisoning, and supply were met, in part, by direct taxation on the villages and towns within the Parliamentary zone, and Highgate, as a relatively prosperous community, was expected to contribute generously. The assessments were heavy, and they fell on a population whose income had already been reduced by the disruption of the coaching trade. The combination of reduced income and increased taxation squeezed the people of Highgate financially, and the war years were remembered for generations afterwards as a period of unusual hardship and deprivation.

Cromwell's Connections

Oliver Cromwell himself had connections with Highgate and its surrounding area that predated the Civil War and that continued throughout the period of the Commonwealth and Protectorate. Cromwell was not a resident of Highgate, but he knew the village well — as a traveller on the Great North Road, as a friend and ally of families who lived in the area, and as a military commander who understood the strategic significance of the hilltop position. During the war years, Cromwell passed through Highgate on numerous occasions, using the Great North Road to travel between London and the Parliamentary armies in the Midlands and the north, and the village's inns provided him with overnight accommodation and fresh horses for the next stage of his journey.

The Cromwellian connection is reflected in the traditions and the place-names of the area. Cromwell House, a handsome brick building on Highgate Hill that dates from the mid-seventeenth century, is named after the Lord Protector, though the nature of Cromwell's association with the house is uncertain. Some traditions claim that Cromwell lived there; others that he merely visited; still others that the house was built by one of his supporters and named in his honour. The building itself — one of the finest examples of mid-seventeenth-century domestic architecture in London — survives to this day, a tangible reminder of the Cromwellian era and of the connections between Highgate and the most powerful figure in the Parliamentary cause.

Cromwell's broader legacy in Highgate is more diffuse but no less significant. The Puritan religious culture that he championed left its mark on the village's religious life, and the tradition of nonconformist worship that was established during the Commonwealth period persisted in Highgate long after the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660. The village's Dissenting chapel, which served the Puritan and later the Congregationalist community, was a direct product of the Cromwellian era, and its survival — through the persecutions of the Restoration period and beyond — testified to the depth of the Puritan sympathies that the Civil War had cultivated among a substantial portion of the Highgate population.

The Restoration Aftermath

The restoration of Charles II in May 1660 brought the Civil War era to an end, but its aftermath lingered in Highgate for decades. The fortifications that had been constructed around the village during the war were dismantled, the garrison was withdrawn, and the village began the slow process of returning to normal life. The coaching trade resumed, the inns reopened for business, and the travellers who had been deterred by the dangers of wartime travel began once more to stream through the village on their way north. The physical scars of the war — the demolished buildings, the cleared land, the battered earthworks — were gradually effaced by new construction and by the natural processes of growth and renewal that transformed the village's appearance over the following decades.

The political consequences of the war were more lasting. The Restoration brought with it a climate of suspicion and retribution in which those who had supported Parliament during the war were liable to persecution, and several Highgate families found their positions uncomfortably exposed. The confiscated estates of Royalist sympathisers were restored to their original owners, and those who had profited from the Parliamentary cause were required to make restitution or face the consequences. The Cavalier Parliament, elected in 1661, passed a series of laws — the Corporation Act, the Act of Uniformity, the Conventicle Act, and the Five Mile Act — that were designed to punish the Puritans and to exclude them from public life, and these laws affected the nonconformist community in Highgate as they affected Dissenters across the country.

Yet the village recovered. The coaching trade, which had been the engine of Highgate's prosperity before the war, resumed with renewed vigour in the decades after the Restoration, and the village entered one of the most prosperous periods in its history. New houses were built, new inns were opened, and the population grew as wealthy Londoners discovered the attractions of the hilltop village with its clean air, its commanding views, and its convenient position on the road north. The Civil War receded into memory, its fortifications levelled and its battles forgotten, leaving behind only the names, the traditions, and the faint, almost invisible traces in the landscape that connect the modern village to its turbulent seventeenth-century past. Highgate endured, as it has always endured — a village on a hill, shaped by history but never overwhelmed by it, looking out across London with the quiet confidence of a community that has seen wars come and go and has survived them all.

*Published in the Hampstead Renovations Heritage Collection — exploring the architecture, history, and stories of London's most remarkable neighbourhoods.*