The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only)

by Diane Purkiss

  He feared, too, that there might be a general collapse of order and as a result foreign intervention in the affairs of Britain: ‘Look but upon other places where they have shaken the obedience of their sovereigns as the Low Countries and Germany, whether ever the sword is like to go from their doors. Hath not Holland ever been the stage of war and as it were the cockpit of all Christendom since they withdrew themselves from the obedience of their sovereign the King of Spain, though he were a tyrant and an usurper.’ He also felt that rebellion against a monarch could never succeed: ‘And doubtless if a King be oppressed by force or the defection of his people it is an injustice that can never be forgotten, and they that force against him have need to be very strong to keep him under by the same force, for they must look for great and frequent attempts which will never be wanting as long as there is any spark left in the hearts of the people of respect to the royal majesty.’ The general tone of the letter is strictly abstract. Salusbury professes no personal loyalty and does not even mention Charles by name. But he also felt deeply about the abstractions he considered, especially the principle of monarchy. Salusbury knew his history; his land was a place from which claimants to the throne had often sprung, from Owen Glendower to the Tudors. Hence he wrote that a war against the king ‘is like to embroil the kingdom in perpetual war as long as any lives that hath or can pretend a title to the Crown, which certainty will never be shut out from its legal prerogatives more than the sea from those bounds which God hath set it’. This was practical, but it was also a principled defence of monarchy as good order that proceeded from a reasonably pessimistic view of the world. The best that could be hoped for was calm, for ‘if it lose in one place it gaineth in another or will be always striving and in distemper while the world endureth’.

  Salusbury, who may already have been a professional soldier before the war, shared at any rate the soldier’s contempt for the courtier: ‘my addresses to the Court have not been out of vanity or ostentation to make large offers, for I have made none, nor out of fashion, but conscience which shall ever lead me till it bring me out of all troubles to eternal peace’.

  Salusbury’s dark vision of the difficulty of order might have come from the paradox of his nationality. The Welsh were seen in England in terms of stereotypes, though these stereotypes were conflicting. For the godly, Wales was a dark corner of the land, requiring spiritual evangelization, while for others, especially those interested in folklore, Wales was the home of the original and ancient Britons. As historian Lloyd Bacon richly shows, still others showed the Welsh as hilarious buffoons. All three representations are elegantly combined in Shakespeare’s brave but foolish Fluellen. The fact that the Welsh spoke a different language helped to put off the ever-insular English. Another Welsh gentleman, John Wynn, wrote to his son Cadwaladr on how to conduct himself at Oxford in the late 1630s – and reminded him not to speak Welsh, not to drink or smoke, and to avoid other riotous Welshmen. Transparently, this advice was meant to help Cadwaladr avoid arousing English prejudices. Wynn himself had aspirations governed by the behaviour of the English gentry. He had just extended and decorated his house with shields of arms over the mantels.

  Welsh efforts to assimilate were to falter under the pressure of events. Once the anti-papist panics began in the wake of the Ulster Rising, the Welsh themselves were seen as menacing, possible doorways for popish armies to enter the British mainland. Meanwhile Welsh political aspirations were satirized: did the funny Welsh want their own Parliament, wondered one pamphlet? The result of all this Parliamentarian and godly prejudice was, predictably, to drive the Welsh into support for the king as the only leader who truly represented them and their interests. The Welsh gentry were therefore outsiders in the world of English gentlemen, but they wanted to belong. A strong monarch might have seemed more likely to uphold their point of view than the English gentlemen in Parliament, and Thomas Salusbury had personal experience of what they could and could not do, having himself sat in the Short Parliament. The fact that he did not try to regain the seat when the Long Parliament was summoned showed his feelings.

  The general Royalism in Wales then drove a wedge between the people of southern England and the Welsh. The Welsh were told that the English would kill their women and children, the English that the Welsh longed for their fertile land and were coming en masse to take it. As in other arenas – religion, class – the war managed to exacerbate divisions that were lying dormant, to break down wary tolerance into open hostility.

  The war could also open divisions in families. One family which split in half on the rock of the war was the Verney family, greater gentry whom we have already met briefly: Ralph and Mary, the concerned and gentle parents of a rickety child, and Edmund, chronicler of the Bishops’ Wars. Ralph Verney was a Parliamentarian, unlike his brother Edmund and his father Sir Edmund, both of whom were Royalists.

  This made for misery. Ralph and his father had stopped writing to each other. Ralph’s mother wrote that ‘your father I find is full of sad thoughts’.

  He saith little to me of it, but saith if the king commands he must go: I dare not say more to him because I would not have him think you said anything to me of it; you I know have serious thoughts concerning your father many ways … Your father sent me word that the king has given him leave to stay till he sends for him; I am very glad of it for when he goes I doubt the love of the Parliament he will lose quite, which I fear will make them do any ill office they can. I am sorry to hear the Lords are raising money and horse; truly if they send to my lord we will part with none: I hope they will not for we are poor, and my lord of his estate but tenant for life cannot tell how to pay a debt if we run into it.

  Later, Ralph’s mother wrote:

  Your father like a good servant I believe is much for his master, and so I think we are all; I wish he may keep that power that is fit for him, but I confess I would not have the papists so powerful; the most of them I believe would be glad to see the Protestants of England in as miserable a condition as they are in Ireland, if it was in their power to make them so. In a few weeks now I hope that we shall see all that is intended; I pray daily that we may have no fighting; I hope the king will command your father to stay where he is … Since I wrote this letter I received your last … I am loath to eat in pewter yet, but truly I have put up most of my plate, and say it is sold, I hope they will send to borrow no money of my lord; if they do we must deny … they talk strange things of my Lord of Essex, that he will seek the King to London dead or alive; this is high methinks for people to talk so.

  Ralph was advised that if only he and his father could meet ‘one discourse or two will make all well again’, and ‘not to write passionately to your father, but overcome him with kindness’. But Edgehill, the first major battle, intervened. And at Edgehill, Sir Edmund refused to put on armour. Nor would he put on the buff-coat, made of thick hide, which afforded some protection against sabres and bullets. He offered himself as a kind of sacrifice, not the last to do so, as we shall see. Was he in despair? Or did he feel he had to redeem impugned family honour? Neither we nor Ralph can know. But his death at Edgehill was a sad way of resolving his dilemma.

  There had been many ominous signs for the Verneys. ‘Melancholy men’, said Clarendon, a category which may have included Sir Edmund Verney, ‘observed many ill presages about this time.’ When the royal standard blew down, this seemed another bad omen for Verney as standard-bearer.

  Ralph had taken the Oath of Allegiance, and so was directly opposed to the king. ‘I long to hear how your father takes your protestation to the Parliament,’ wrote a mutual friend, ‘I fear he will be much trouble at first, but in a little I hope will make him pass it over. I find by your father’s letter you sent me down, he is a most sad man. I pray God he may do well. I fear his troubles together will make an end of him.’ Sir Edmund was ‘much troubled’ by Ralph’s choice, but he told a friend that ‘he hath ever lain near my heart, and truly he is there still’. Sir Edmund was not a who
lehearted, rip-roaring Royalist, but a loyalist who believed he had no choice. ‘He is passionate, and much troubled, I believe, that you declared yourself for Parliament … maybe he would have the king think he was a little displeased with you for going that way; if you can be absent from the parliament I think it would be very well. I am sure I should think it a very great happiness to be in your company. Now let me entreat you as a friend that loves you most heartily not to write passionately to your father, but overcome him with kindness; good man, I see he is infinitely melancholy, for many other things I believe beside the distance between you.’ Ralph felt he did have a choice, and made it.

  Next is the Tale of the Noblewoman and her Son, a tale of division and heartbreak. Other families were even more deeply and hurtfully divided.

  Susan Feilding, Countess of Denbigh, was the sister of the wily, beautiful and unlamented George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, favourite of both James I and Charles I. Like her brother, she was clever, beautiful and ambitious. She was at court from the 1620s, and a powerful member of the queen’s circle, though she and Henrietta differed in matters of religion, for in 1625 Susan was a Protestant, though she was not godly; she was one of Laud’s keenest supporters. She had been a Lady of the Bedchamber since the very early days of the queen’s presence in England, along with Lucy Hay and the Duchess of Buckingham. Like Lucy, Susan tried to use her position to influence events, but she was less successful, though also less controversial, than the dashing Lucy. She was godmother to Princess Mary, sharing the post with Lucy herself. And unlike Lucy, she conformed to the queen’s requirements in matters of religion, attending Mass with Henrietta in her Oratory, ultimately converting to Roman Catholicism while in exile. Her daughter Mary Feilding, later the Marchioness of Hamilton, had already converted in a blaze of adverse publicity, as did her niece Ann, Countess of Newport. The family’s fate was strongly tied to the fortunes of the queen and her circle.

  Susan’s husband William declared for the king (and was to be killed in 1643). But her eldest son Basil unexpectedly declared for Parliament. He himself said lack of preferment was the immediate cause, but that was after the Restoration, when a passionate declaration of principle would have been very tactless. By June 1639 Basil had been removed from his ambassadorial post in Venice, leaving a trail of debts. He had not been an especially lucky or gifted civil servant, but had been diligent in finding pictures for the king. Susan Feilding found it impossible to accept his decision. In a series of heartfelt but also calculating letters, she implored him to change his mind. One especially impassioned appeal was written in mid-1642, before the shooting war had begun. It began by accusing Basil of something akin to possession by another: ‘Methinks you spoke Mr Pym’s language, and I do long to hear my dear son Feilding speak once again to me in the duty he owes to his Master and dread sovereign, the master of your poor afflicted mother, banished from the sight of you I do so dearly love.’ Unlike Thomas Salusbury, Susan did not use reasoned political argument to try to win Basil to the Royalist cause, but arguments based on feeling and on family ties. She argued that he was making a disastrous career move: ‘Let me entreat you to look back upon me and on yourself whose ruin surely I see before my eyes. All that is here does more wonder at you than at all the rest, your fortune being but weak, and the many obligations you and your best friends have to the King and Queen.’ Moreover, he was, she felt sure, siding with the losers. She told him firmly that the king was going to win, and that he was choosing the less fashionable, popular side: ‘The King is now in a very good condition, and doth daily grow better, his people being every day more and more his. Do not deceive yourself, he shall not want men nor money to do him service. All good men begin to see how he hath been abused, and none are undeceived, and I hope you will be amongst them.’

  She reminded him that other powerful men were making more sensible choices and securing their own advancement: ‘I hear my lord Paget and many other lords are going to York [to join the king]. Oh that I might be so happy as to hear you were gone too.’ And she did not shrink from passionate emotional appeals, melodramatic and even stagey: ‘Let my pen beg that which, if I were with you, I would do upon my knees with tears’, she wrote passionately, adding ‘I want language to persuade with you, though I do not love and reason. Therefore for the great God of Heaven’s sake let me prevail with you. Do not let me be made unhappy by you, my dear son. I have suffered grief and sorrow enough already; let me reap comfort from you in this action. Remember it is a loving mother that begs for the preservation of her eldest son.’ Her final sentences summed up her twin appeal. She stressed the choice of the fashionable Earl of Holland, who, she says, ‘is gone to the King’. Neatly, she turns this news into a fresh appeal: ‘I hope the next news it will be you, and so with my blessings to you, and my daughter, I take my leave.’

  Susan Feilding is using the private language of motherhood to try to change her son’s political allegiance. Like many a mother in Shakespeare’s history plays, she is carrying out a powerful political act, called pleading – it sounds weak, but was a vital skill for female courtiers. At its strongest, this could be the appeal of Clytemnestra. At the end of Aeschylus’s Libation-Bearers, when Orestes confronts his mother, she shows him the breast that suckled him as an argument against his taking vengeance on her. In a similar tone, Susan Feilding wrote that ‘I have too great a part in you, that you are cruel to deny me any longer’. How could the familial body be divided? To Susan that unnatural division was symbolic of the unnaturalness of the emergence of a party that opposed the king.

  This kind of division troubled all Civil War writers. The whole point of civil war is to divide families and other groups that normally – or normatively, ideologically – understand themselves to be united. For Susan, it’s almost as if her son choosing a different side impinges on her identity – and so it was perhaps perceived at court. That is why her emotional entreaties are combined with active appeals to ambition and common sense, or – less kindly – an eye to the main chance. She may even have been writing not for Basil’s eyes only, but for the queen’s, hoping to show her the letter and thus clear herself.

  On another occasion she wrote, more flagrantly: ‘I am much troubled to hear that the king lay any marks of disfavour upon you, for I desire you should prosper in all things’, but at once she segues into a rationale for that discomfort with the split in the family. She says her grief over the division is like a new and painful childbirth: ‘I do more travail with sorrow for the grief I suffer for the ways that you take, that the king does believe you are against him, than ever I did to bring you into this world … ’ Susan Feilding is asking Basil to put the claims of the mother who bore him above what would have seemed to the king’s foes the sovereign interpretive reason of the individual, to put loyalty to his family above his conscience – or rather, to make that loyalty the governing force of his conscience. It was this enmeshment of the individual in society that people like John Milton were to resist so vehemently with a new, even eccentric notion of individual liberty irrespective of marital or familial ties, a notion of the individual as an island, entire of itself. It was an idea born out of opposition to the cosy entanglings of Royalist rhetoric.

  It was not just Susan who was trying to enfold Basil into the unity of the Feilding family. Susan also persuaded her son-in-law James, Duke of Hamilton, to speak to the king on Basil’s behalf. Basil’s sister Elizabeth also wrote twice to him, telling him ‘pray Brother, leave the way you are’ since his ‘name had grown odious in print’ and that if he stayed with Parliament he was risking his wealth and estates, incurring God’s wrath, and losing his honour. Elizabeth also told him that there must have been a mist before his eyes when he said that only he and his party were truly for the king. Elizabeth pointed out tartly that ‘the intention of a war against him [the king], which is daily spoke of in London’ seems likely to remove the mist. She said that she was hopeful that he would go into the country, for after serving the king, she t
hinks the next best thing ‘is to retire from the doing of those actions which are against him’.

  We don’t have Basil’s reply. Elizabeth went on, game, immovable, and like her mother asserting ties of kinship above other loyalties: ‘Dear Brother, I can yet call you,’ she wrote sweetly, but added, with an unmistakable note of venom, ‘since it hath not been in your power to hinder the king from being in a probability of getting what you would so fain have wrested from him.’ Like her mother, she dwelt on the probable cost to Basil’s career: ‘Your harsh proceedings will be a means to hurt yourselves and advance the king’s cause,’ she wrote tartly, and much more angrily than Susan, she added ‘which I infinitely rejoice at, for, seeing you have so willingly thrown away at once, your honour, gratitude, and all that’s good, the bare name of brother serves to make me observe the more the losing of these qualities which make you dearer to me than the title.’ Elizabeth made it clear that she had no time for treachery; so while her mother wrote submissively, emotionally, lovingly, Elizabeth made it apparent that her brother had lost her good opinion, if not her loyalty. She sounded exasperated rather than pleading: ‘Can no consideration move you to be true to the King, neither fear of God, the punishment of what will follow, nor the desire of gaining your lost honour’, she asked testily.