During the English Civil War (1642–1651) and for a time afterwards Roundhead was a term of derision - in the New Model Army it was a punishable offence to call a fellow soldier a Roundhead. Charles I believed in absolute power and the divine right of kings, most Roundheads appear to have sought a constitutional monarchy. The Civil War was not a religious war at the stat but a political war with three periods of fighting. Sometimes considered as a sequence of discrete wars. (1st. 1642-44; 2nd. 1648-49 & 3rd.1649-51).