The Last Battle of the English Civil War Was Not Fought in England, But in Colonial America
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. He sought to surprise the Puritans and compel them to swear allegiance to Lord Baltimore. Instead, the Puritans surprised and routed the governor’s force with a sudden attack 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.