The Politicised Child During the Seventeenth-Century British Civil Wars: An Historical Perspective on Representations of Children and Trauma During Conflict

The seventeenth-century British Civil Wars had a scale and impact to rival modern conflicts and its effects extended to children as well as adults. What might be today termed “child soldiers” were found in the armies in combat and supporting roles. Many more were witnesses to the conflict or had their lives changed by its consequences. This article is an historical case study of socio-cultural constructions of children, childhood and warfare. It aims to highlight the diverse nature of both historic and modern child experiences of warfare, and the plethora of ways that these experiences were and are understood and represented by adults. It argues that the evidence from the Civil Wars supports the scholarship of child psychologists such as Derek Summerfield that children in conflict should not always be regarded as victims but could display agency, whilst also acknowledging social, cultural, economic and political pressures. Although children in the Civil Wars may have experienced trauma, the evidence is insufficient to prove this and evidence for a contemporary concept of the psychologically damaged child as a result of conflict is ambiguous. However, what the evidence does uncover is the ways in which adults used representations of children to express their own anxieties about the Civil Wars.