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

by Diane Purkiss

  By 7 September, Wharton was wondering if his letters were getting through ‘because you never yet honoured me with a piece of paper’. By now, he says, the army is getting tired of it all: the foot are on the point of rebellion, because they have not been paid, and because ‘the footmen are much abused and sometimes pillaged and wounded’. One of the Five Members, John Hampden, ‘tried to appease them, but could not’. By Monday, though, normal service had been resumed, and Wharton and his men could report that all venison belonging to malignants had been destroyed, while they were in pursuit of a ‘base priest’ who had arms in his house, but on the way he met a servant of Justice Edmonds, who had been pillaged by the bluecoats of Colonel Cholmondeley. Wharton divided his men in three, surrounded the Royalists, and forced them to carry their plunder back to their victim. Unsurprisingly, he was rewarded lavishly with a scarlet coat, ‘lined with plush’, and (even better) with ‘several excellent books in folio of my own choosing’, he wrote happily on 13 September 1642.

  Wharton was a pillager, but he was no philistine. A relatively poor man who could not normally afford folios, his delight in books is evident. The war was opening doors for him that he could only enter as a thief. But on the way back to camp, the biters were bit; Wharton was intercepted by angry Royalists, who ‘pillaged me of all, and robbed me of my very sword, for which cause I told them that I would either have my sword or die in the field, commanded my men to charge with bullet, and by divisions to fire on them, which made them with shame return me my sword’.

  Incidents like this probably motivated the troops, as did reports of the (rather similar) behaviour of their opponents; when Wharton’s groups heard that Prince Rupert ‘that diabolical cavalier’ was surrounding Leicester and demanding 2000 pounds or else threatening to plunder the town, ‘our soldiers were even mad to be at them, but wanted commission’. To us what seems oddest is Wharton’s mixture of eager plundering gusto and holiness. Wharton’s troop often heard two sermons a day as travelling preachers reached them: John Sedgewick, Mr Marshall, Mr Ash. The contradiction is resolved when it emerges that the sermons were, in fact, exhortations to holy war.

  Eventually a letter and parcel reached Wharton from his master, sending him a scarf from his mistress, a hatband, and gold and silver lace. He had a smart suit made. ‘And I hope I shall never stain them except in the blood of a cavalier’, he wrote, boyishly enough. In his gold lace and scarlet suit, and his scarf, Wharton was not dressed in the manner that a modern costume designer would choose for a godly Parliamentarian. Instead – as with the books – he sees the war as a chance to cut an exceptional dash, even to break some sumptuary laws. And he was not alone. There were many men in the army of Parliament that wore huge hats with feathers, and men in sober black and wideawake hats who fought for the king.

  Wharton’s letter from his master was so full of exciting London news that he showed it to the captains of his regiment, who were dining with one of the preachers, and returned thanks and greetings. Wharton was still concerned about whether his mail was getting through, though, and added, ‘every day you may find a post that serveth our army at the Saracen’s Head, in Carter Lane. His name is Thomas Weedon, who is with us once a week constantly.’ There was no army mail service, and no Royal Mail either. Wharton and others had to find private individuals, carriers, to take their letters for them. These could be permanent ‘posts’, like the one Wharton mentions, or personal servants, or just chums who happened to be going to London.

  But though there were luxuries, there was also privation. When quartered at Burford, he complained that ‘many of our soldiers can get neither beds, bread, nor water’. As they moved on Worcester, the weather worsened, ‘such foul weather that before I had marched one mile I was wet to the skin’. Rain, unnoticeable to civilians, became crucial once men were on the march for days at a time. Things went from bad to worse: an engagement with Prince Rupert resulted in the death of some key officers, and ‘our wounded men they brought into the city, and stripped, stabbed and slashed their dead bodies in a most barbarous manner’. Rupert’s men also met, Wharton says, ‘a young gentleman, a Parliament-man, as I am informed, his name I cannot learn – and stabbed him on horseback with many wounds, and trampled upon him’. Stories like this one could circulate as news in London, increasing the city’s alarm.

  They had another miserable night. War was showing its uglier face to Wharton: ‘we abode all night, where we had small comfort, for it rained hard. Our food was fruit, for those who could get it; our drink, water; our beds, the earth; our canopy, the clouds; but we pulled up the hedges, pales and gates, and made a good fire; his Excellency promising us that if the country relieved us not the day following, he would fire their towns. Thus we continued singing of psalms till the morning. Saturday morning we marched into Worcester – our regiment in the rear of the waggons – the rain continuing the whole day, and the way so base that we went up to the ankles in thick clay; and about four of the clock after noon, entered the city, where we found twenty-eight dead men, whom we buried – some of the cavaliers – and those were all that we can find slain upon our side.’ On 26 September he wrote, presciently, ‘we shortly expect a pitched battle, which, if the cavaliers will but stand, will be very hot; for we are all much enraged against them for their barbarisms, and shall show them little mercy’. He also had a surprisingly good time visiting Worcester Cathedral, delightedly admiring King Arthur’s tomb ‘but no picture thereon’. He looked forward with more and more excitement and trepidation to the pitched battle, as soldiers do, hoping for something definitive:

  They boast wonderfully, and swear most hellishly, that the next time they meet us they will make but a mouthful of us, but I am persuaded the Lord hath given them this small victory, that they may in the day of battle come on more presumptuously to their own destruction, in which battle though I and many thousand more may be cut off, yet I am confident the Lord of Hosts will in the end triumph gloriously over these horses and all their cursed riders.

  To London-born Nehemiah Wharton, Worcester was a foreign city, unlike the world he knew:

  the city is so vile, and the country so base, papistical, and atheistical and abominable, that it resembles Sodom, and is the very emblem of Gomorrah, and doubtless it would have been worse than either Algiers or Malta, a very den of thieves, and refuge for all the hell-hounds in the country; I should have said in the land, but we have handsomely handled some of them, and do cull out the rest as fast as we can.

  Like most soldiers, Wharton recorded events in detail, but he also began to note impressions of people and places, like a travel-writer. He recorded the same turbulence in Herefordshire that terrified Brilliana Harley:

  the citizens [of Hereford] were resolved to oppose us to the death, and having in the city three pieces of ordinance, charged them with nails, stones, etc, and placed them against us, and we against them, resolving either to enter the city or die before it. But the Roundheads in the city, one of them an alderman, surnamed Lane, persuaded the silly mayor, (for so he is indeed) that his excellency and all his forces were at hand, whereupon he opened unto us, and we entered the city at Bicesters gate, but found the doors shut, many of the people with their children fled, and had enough to do to get a little quarter.

  He added, however, some local observations: ‘The inhabitants are totally ignorant in the ways of God, and much addicted to drunkenness and other vices, but principally unto swearing, so that the children that have scarce learned to speak do universally swear stoutly. Many here speak Welsh.’

  He also reports the grisly accidents of war, inevitable with so many men armed and not very disciplined: ‘This day our companies exercising in the fields at Worcester, one of the Lord General’s soldiers shot at random, and, with a brace of bullets, shot one of his fellow soldiers in the head, who immediately died.’

  After this, Nehemiah Wharton’s letters cease. No one knows what became of him. We know what happened to his regiment, though. At Edgehill, a few s
hort weeks later, Denzil Holles’s men were smashed like tinder by Rupert’s horse, though ‘everyone fought like a lion’. What was left of it re-formed and was destroyed by the Royalists on 12 November at Brentford, killed, captured, or drowned. It was never re-formed. Wharton was probably among its casualties, cut off, like so many, at the very moment when he was learning to think for himself.

  The violence done on the battlefield and in families found an echo in a breakdown of neighbourly relations. When Richard Culmer saw a window with a depiction of the Salvator Mundi – Jesus as Saviour of the World – in the vicarage house at Minster, near Canterbury, he had no hesitation in breaking it to pieces, even though it was in a private house and not a place of worship. Equally merciless was the young William Springate, who as deputy lieutenant for Kent in the 1640s encouraged his soldiers to break pictures and crosses, and handed out surplices to clothe pregnant women. One day, on a visit to a co-Parliamentarian who helped in a search-and-destroy mission to ‘popish’ houses, and who had a firmly Puritan wife, Springate caught sight of paintings of the crucifixion and resurrection hanging in the hall. He sliced the pictures out of their frames and presented them, spiked on his sword, to his host’s wife in the parlour, from where the paintings had been removed, ‘to manifest a kind of neglect of them’. ‘What a shame it is’, Springate’s widow recalled him saying, that ‘thy husband should be so zealous a prosecutor of the papists, and spare such things in his own house!’

  In the weeks following the Battle of Edgehill, the king was marching on London. The Parliamentarians established a forward post at Brentford; three regiments were placed there, including Denzil Holles’s redcoats, and the greencoats of John Hampden. Rupert’s men managed to capture the advanced post, but were checked at the barricades, which had been reinforced by artillery. This was to be one of the crunch points of the war, one of the moments which determined events.

  The exhaustingly energetic political activist John Lilburne had asked for a troop of horse, having ‘showed his valour’ at Edgehill, but his Parliamentarian commander the Earl of Warwick begged him to defend London. ‘I hope we shall beat him,’ he said, ‘and the wars will be at an end before thou canst get a troop of horse raised, but if thou leavest me now, I shall think thou art either turned covetous, and therefore would have a troop of horse for a little more pay, or else thou art turned coward, and therefore would leave thy foot company, now when we are going to fight, and I do believe should do it tomorrow.’ Warwick saw the coming battle as crucial.

  Lilburne rose to the occasion, and said that he would take his horse ‘and post away to Brentford to your Regiment and fight as resolutely tomorrow as your Lordship shall’. So he was present when Prince Rupert and his men suddenly materialized from the mist in the early morning of 12 November. They attacked Denzil Holles’s Parliamentarian regiment, which suffered heavy casualties and began to fall back on the town. Lilburne managed to galvanize the men around him with a stirring speech, calling upon them to show the gallantry of soldiers and be willing to shed their blood for the good of their country. The Royalist soldiers turned back into Brentford, and ransacked nearby houses for powder and match. They met with the remnant of Holles’s shattered forces, who fought desperately and gamely against overwhelming numbers. They faced cannon and musket fire before and on their flanks, and had only a few straggling hedgerows for shelter. Some men were forced into the river, some swimming to safety while others drowned. Lilburne himself was captured, and taken off to Oxford Castle. But Parliament’s train of artillery escaped.

  The Welsh Royalist soldier John Gwynne remembered:

  The very first day that five comrades of us repaired from the Court at Richmond to the King’s royal army, which we met accidentally that morning upon Hounslow heath, we had no sooner put ourselves into rank and file … but we marched up to the enemy, engaged them by Sir Richard Wynne’s house, and the Thames side, beat them to retreat into Brentford, beat them from the one Brentford to the other, and from thence to the open field, with a resolute and expeditious fighting, that after one firing suddenly to advance up to push of pikes and the butt-end of muskets, which proved so fatal to Holles his butchers and dyers that day, that abundance of them were killed and taken prisoners, besides those drowned in their attempt to escape by leaping into the river. And at that very time were come a great recruit of men to the enemy, both by land and water, from Windsor and Kingston; and it happened that Sir Charles Lloyd, or some other engineer, to blow up a barge laden with men and ammunition, which, as the fearful crack it gave, and the sad aspect upon it, struck such a terror into the rest of the recruits, that they all vanished, and we better satisfied with their room than their company.

  Gwynne said less about Rupert’s later activities in Brentford; as usual, the gallant Cavaliers were too fond of plunder: ‘They have taken from the inhabitants all the linen, bedding furniture, pewter, brass, pots, pans, bread, meal, in a word all that they have … leaving them not a bed to lie on.’

  This stupid greed motivated Londoners to defend themselves. On 12 November, the London trained bands turned out in Chelsea Fields, led by Major-General Philip Skippon, a man who had risen through the ranks in the Dutch wars by merit. He was a simple man, brave, soldierly, and passionate about religion. The poet and tutor John Milton was afraid, but hoped his literary skill would save him. He pinned a sonnet composed for the occasion to his door:

  Captain or colonel, or knight-in-arms,

  Whose chance on these defenceless doors may seize,

  If deed of honour did thee ever please,

  Guard them, and him within protect from harms …

  With his usual sense that he was firmly at the centre of the known universe, Milton wasn’t merely asking to be spared. He was asking to be kept under guard as a National Treasure. He uses some language that would have been familiar to Royalist officers: the language of honour, and also of client-patron relations; he promises that he will ‘spread thy name o’er lands and seas/Whatever clime the sun’s bright circle warms’. He flatteringly likens his future guard to Alexander, and diligently butters himself up as well by comparing himself to Pindar, whose house was the only one in Thebes that Alexander did not burn. It may be that all this rather extravagant language might have won the hearts of officers, but it may also have been fortunate that many of their men couldn’t read; if ever someone was asking to be taken down a peg or two, it was the author of this sonnet.

  The day after the battle, 13 November, being a Sunday, Essex and Skippon urged their men to pray, and then fight. ‘Hey for old Robin!’ shouted the soldiers, for Essex. There was almost a party atmosphere. The troops had a hot meal, recorded Bulstrode Whitelocke: ‘The city goodwives, and others, mindful of their husbands and friends, sent many cartloads of provisions, and wines, and good things to Turnham-Green, with which the soldiers were refreshed, and made merry.’

  The Royalists watched them eat, their own bellies empty. Charles was heavily outnumbered. His men were tired and ill-equipped. And his stomach may have turned at the idea of slaughtering the ordinary civilians that barred the way to London. He decided that there could be no battle: not then, not there. He withdrew to Hounslow, and then fell back on Reading, and then to Oxford. He could have swung south-east and come at the city from Kent. He could have re-formed and determined to take London. He didn’t, and this decision was one of his worst.

  John Gwynne thought they had done the best they could:

  Nor can anything of a soldier or an impartial man say that we might have advanced any further to the purpose towards London than we did, in regard of the thick enclosures, with strong hedges and ditches so lined with men as they could well stand by one another; and on the common road and other passes, were planted their artillery, with defensible works about them, that there was no coming at them any nearer, upon so great a disadvantage, to do any more than we did, and withal considering that they were more than double our number; therefore the King withdrew, and marched for Hampton Court,
where, for my farther encouragement, I had the colours conferred upon me, to go on as I had begun. I cannot omit observing, that Essex his right wing of horse, which stood on more ground than the king had horse to face them, wheeled to the left to join with the foot that came from Windsor, and Kingston, and fallen on the King’s rear, he might have gone to London nolens volens.

  Gwynne’s words cast doubt on his own statement, for he stresses the extent of London’s defences; natural ones such as ditches and hedges which could be used by snipers, and new siegeworks which had been hastily thrown up by the citizens. The Venetian ambassador recorded that ‘they [Londoners] are working incessantly with a great number of pioneers’, claiming that among the workers were ‘women and little children’. The Lady Mayoress was one of them, carrying a spade; as Samuel Butler wrote disdainfully later, ‘From ladies down to oyster wenches/Laboured like pioneers in trenches’. So urgent had the need been that work had continued even on Sundays; it was, said the clergy stoutly, the Lord’s own work. These defences would be extended enormously later that same year and in early 1643, encircling the city with a ring of earthworks. Urged on by ministers, whole parishes turned out to dig. The Guilds had a friendly contest to see which could do the most. Even clerks and gentlemen got their hands dirty. The result was to make London look too big a mouthful for even the most voracious Royalist strategist.

  The early campaigns had ended in military stalemate. But the war was not altogether about military objectives.

  IX Down with Bishops and Bells: Iconoclasm

  Nehemiah Wharton was an iconoclast. The Second Commandment insisted that there should be no ‘graven image’ made unto God. The iconoclasts set out to enforce it. For them, this was what the war was about.