Were there any battles or skirmishes between rival factions in the English colonies of America as a result of the ongoing civil war in England, 1642 to 1648?(Or 1648,1650-51)
I’m not aware of any, but a fair number of New Englanders went back to England to serve in the Parliamentary armies. Remember that the American colonies had not been in business very long when the thing broke out. Jamestown and Virginia were founded in 1608, Plymouth Plantation in 1620, and Charles I executed in 1649. There were hardly enough people in British North America to work up a good bar fight and they all had their own problems with just keeping body and soul together.
Yes, sort of. (Maybe.) A real hisotrian can clarify this for us, but I understand that a small force from Cromwell’s Commonwealth landed in MD colony and fought some battles that were quite small compared with the ones back home to establish/enforce Protestant rule there, vice the rule of the Catholic to Catholic-leaning proprietorship of the Calvert Family. But I beleive it wasn’t until the Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the capitol was moved from St Mary’s City to Annapolis.
I don’t think there were any battles between forces from the various colonies, as in (say) VA to MD or MA to MD.
IIRC, the population in most of the colonies was very, very small in those days. I think the primary concern of a colony was defending itself against famine and the elements, then defending against any Indian attacks. The concerns of the mother counrty were rather remote. I beleive that one History of MD I read a few years ago (I forget the title) said that the population of the colony was under 4,000 settlers until about 1700.
The sources I have say that the people of Maryland surrendered to the forces from the Commonwealth without any bloodshed. Virginia had already done this.
The colonial charters were rewritten, most notably in Maryland where the official toleration of Catholics was ended. This did lead to some tension in the colony and in 1655 a small force of 130 soldiers led by William Stone attempted to fight the new Maryland government forces and were pretty much wiped out in a battle along the Severn River.
In addition, some soldiers from Connecticut took over a Dutch trading post in Hartford as part of a larger Anglo-Dutch conflict.
Some of the best American accounts of the English Civil War were written by Increase Mather ("known as “Crecy” to chums), who travelled from Massachusetts to England before, during, and after the Puritan takeover. His changing religious and political views as Puritanism went from an opressed minority to a tyrannical oligrarchy are fascinating.