the English crossed the Firth of Forth to land a force in Fife; they defeated the Scots at Inverkeithing and so threatened the northern Scottish strongholds. Leslie and Charles II marched south in an unsuccessful attempt to rally Royalist supporters in England. The Scottish government, left in an untenable situation, surrendered to Cromwell, who then followed the Scottish army south. At the Battle of Worcester, precisely one year after the Battle of Dunbar, Cromwell crushed the Scottish army, ending the war. Background First and Second English Civil Wars After years of rising tensions, the relationship between the king of England, Charles I, and his English Parliament broke down in armed conflict in 1642, starting the First English Civil War. Charles was also, but separately, king of Scotland. He had gone to war with his Scottish subjects in the Bishops' Wars in 1639 and 1640. These had arisen from the Scots' refusal to accept Charles's attempts to reform the Scottish Kirk to bring it into line with English religious practices. Charles was not successful in these endeavours and the ensuing settlement established the Covenanters' hold on Scottish government, requiring all civil office-holders, parliamentarians and clerics to sign the National Covenant and giving the Scottish Parliament the authority to approve all of the king's councillors in Scotland. In England, Charles's supporters, the Royalists, were opposed by the combined forces of the English Parliamentarians and the Scots, who in 1643 had formed an alliance bound by the Solemn League and Covenant, in which the English Parliament agreed to reform the English church along similar lines to the Scottish Kirk in return for the Scots' military assistance. After four years of war the Royalists were defeated. With his capital at Oxford under siege, Charles escaped on 27 April 1646, surrendered to the Scots at Southwell on 5 May and was taken to Newcastle, which was in Scottish hands. The Scots and the English Parliament agreed on a peace settlement which they put before the King. Known as the Newcastle Propositions, it would have required all of the King's subjects in Scotland, England and Ireland to sign the Solemn League and Covenant, brought the church in each kingdom into accordance with the Covenant and with Presbyterianism and ceded much of Charles's secular authority as king of England to the English Parliament. The Scots spent some months trying to persuade Charles to agree to these terms,