In this bold history of the men who directed and determined the outcome of the mid-seventeenth-century British wars - from Cromwell, Fairfax, and Essex to many more lesser-known figures - military historian Malcolm Wanklyn offers the first assessment of leadership and the importance of command in the civil wars. Wanklyn examines how the generals prepared for, fought in, and followed up a battle, and he provides an incisive appraisal of the performance of individual commanders set against their peers and across the period.

Malcolm Wanklyn is Professor of History at the University of Wolverhampton, and former head of the Department of History and War Studies. He has taught postgraduate and undergraduate courses on seventeenth-century history for many years, and has lectured widely on the Civil War to both academic and non-academic audiences. He has published extensively on early modern England, and is the author of A Military History of the English Civil War 1642-1646 and Decisive Battles of the English Civil War.

"Wanklyn provides a useful, well-researched, general narrative of the higher direction of the Civil Wars." -John Childs, BBC History Magazine

"This is a work of erudite scholarship, which, as with all histories that deserve to be widely read, demonstrates its theoretical rigour in the unquestionable validity if its conclusions." -Ian Cawood, Times Literary Supplement