19. The English Civil War Was Also Fought on American Soil
By the 1650s, Parliament had won the English Civil War. King Charles I had been captured, tried, convicted, and beheaded, his heir had fled to the continent, and England was ruled by a Lord Protector, the Puritan Oliver Cromwell. Small scale fighting still flared up every now and then between Royalists and Parliamentarians, and one such flare up, which came to be known as the Battle of the Severn, took place on American soil in Annapolis, Maryland, on March 25th, 1655.
It came about when Maryland’s governor, sworn to the colony’s royalist Catholic Lord Baltimore, sailed with a small militia to the Puritan settlement of Providence, today’s Annapolis. The aim was to surprise the Puritans and compel them to swear allegiance to Lord Baltimore, but the Puritans ended up surprising and routing the governor’s force by attacking it from the rear. By the time it was over, the governor’s militia had lost 49 men, while the Puritans lost only 2. The engagement holds the distinction of being the last battle fought in the English Civil War.