After he had confronted his old friend and neighbor Sir Ralph Hopton, Sir William Waller called the English Civil War a “warr without an Enemie” (quoted in McGrath 1997:91). For him, the real enemy could only be foreign and unfamiliar.

Civil war fails to supply such enemies, for it is mostly an intimate war taking place “on home ground against the home-grown” (Donagan 1994:1137). Even when civil war supplies foreign enemies, as is the case with occupation and foreign intervention, the foreigners acquire local allies who tend to focalize the antagonism of their local rivals.

Intimacy is essential rather than incidental to civil war: it defines “civil war in its most basic sense” (Ash 1995:125); it is a “fratricidal” war “against our selves, our brothers,” as the English Civil War was described by contemporary participants (Donagan 1994:1166); it divides families, pitting brothers and sisters, parents and children, against each other (e.g., S. Dillon 1991:xiii; West 1985:132).