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

by Diane Purkiss

  But if anyone remembered Rubens in the bleaker London of 1643, it was as Henrietta’s hireling, ambassador for popery, keen demonizer of revolutionary energies. None of these memories was likely to inspire Marten and Clotworthy to be careful with his painting. They also wanted to wreck it not only because it was art, but because it was good art. That day, a master’s work perished mostly because it was masterly, because it might actually influence people.

  Clotworthy and his men proceeded to the side chapels, where they broke up two paintings of the Virgin and of St Francis, perhaps the iconoclasts’ least favourite saint. In the vestry, they flung a large statue of the Virgin and Child to the floor, and then smashed the Virgin’s face and the face of her child with feet and then with clubs. The sound of splintering stone spurred them on. In the chapel garden, they found another statue of St Francis, which they also destroyed, and another crucifix, ripe for breaking.

  The crackling fires that the soldiers lit burned long into the night, consuming shreds of canvas, books, rich embroidered vestments. On Good Friday, the soldiers destroyed some minor masterpieces – Matthew Goodrich’s and Thomas de Critz’s oval ceiling painting of the Assumption of the Virgin, a work even larger than Rubens’s Crucifixion. The remnants not burnt were again flung into the Thames.

  Perhaps Charles’s flight from London with the queen was not the stupid act historians have sometimes made it appear. For this passion of violence could as easily have been unleashed against Henrietta herself; not directly, but through Parliament, as it had been against Strafford and Laud. By 1643, she had become the most hated queen in English history since Edward IV’s wife, Elizabeth Woodville. And it was she and her influence that men like Marten and Clotworthy most wanted to destroy.

  The queen was only too involved in affairs of state. The perception that she was involved itself helped to harden attitudes, because Henrietta was a troubling figure. The very closeness of her relationship with the king, their conjugal bliss, was a source of anxiety; a woman, a foreigner and a fervent Catholic at the heart of affairs exacerbated the dread of popery that Pym had been exploiting. Parliament’s constant complaints about Jesuited papists lurking everywhere were directed squarely at her. One declaration actually said that Charles should stop listening to his wife. That was one reason why it seemed sensible to protect her – and defuse the tensions she aroused, too – by getting her right out of England, to Holland. So on 23 February 1642, she and Charles parted, in tears. Charles waved the ship out of sight.

  But the queen’s behaviour during the war upset people further. She sought help from overseas – from foreigners, and Romish foreigners at that; the sensible Dutch Protestants took little notice of her, though she managed to buy some guns from William of Orange after a lot of haggling. She was, thought one of her critics, on a kind of shopping spree: ‘Who went to the Brokers with the Jewels of the crown, and the cupboard of gold plate? Who bought pocket-pistols, barrels of powder, and many such pretty toys to destroy the Protestants? Was it Queen Mary? The very same.’

  Her activities contributed to her extreme unpopularity in the country at large. In the north, Thomas Beevers, a dyer of Thurleston, ‘said he would lay ten pounds the Kings ears were stowled of within a month [i.e. that he was cuckolded], and that the queen was gone over into Holland to play the whore’. Going somewhere without your husband was itself whorish enough. But going off to buy weapons and raise money was not what the common people expected from a queen. Henrietta persevered, however, even though few of her weapons reached the king. She decided to go home. ‘I need the air of England’, she wrote. She sailed in early February 1643, but had to return to Holland after a terrible storm in which the ladies of the court had been forced to shout their sins at their confessors so as to plummet shriven to the bottom of the sea. Henrietta later remembered what interesting things she had heard. But she set out again in late February, and evading a Parliamentarian attempt to intercept her, reached Bridlington and began distributing her provisions to the king’s armies of the north, thus ensuring that they would be regarded as even more darkly popish by their foes. She joined Charles near Edgehill, and the town of Kineton, scene of so much bloodshed and division, now witnessed a very happy reunion of the whole family, including the princes. Soon the royal family were all settled in Oxford, the king’s new capital.

  There she kept up a pasteboard version of the old life. In the midst of the sterner concerns of 1643, Henrietta wrote to Charles about a friend’s woes:

  The Duchess of Buckingham [Lady Catherine Manners, Countess of Antrim, widow of Buckingham] has begged me to write to you that you would order secretary Nicholas to write on your behalf to her children to obey her, or else they will be lost; for they have no-one near them to take care of them, and they are becoming debauched. As to their concerns, she will not meddle with them in any fashion in the world, only let them believe what she says to them, that they may not be lost in this world. It would be a very small honour for you to see them ill brought up, after you have taken them under your care.

  But the cultural project of change was faltering. On 26 October 1643 George Wither reported that ‘it is there thought also by some of His Majesties Servants (as our Mercury verily believeth) that the queen will not have so many Masques at Christmas and Shrovetide this year as she was wont to have other years heretofore; because Inigo Jones cannot conveniently make such Heavens and paradises at Oxford as he did at White-hall, and because the Poets are dead, beggared, or run away who were wont in their late masques to make Gods and Goddesses of them, and shamefully to flatter them with attributes neither fitting to be ascribed or accepted of; and some are of the opinion that this is one of the innumerable vanities which hath made them and us become so miserable at this day’.

  Once ensconced in Oxford, Henrietta had the same company as in London; they brought their own furniture from home, while the queen took over the Warden’s lodgings in Merton; he was a Parliament-man who had fled to London. The room a visitor was most likely to see was the presence chamber, with the queen seated on a raised dais to receive formal visitors, and this was also where she dined formally, attended by her cupbearer and her carver. It was large and light, and it was approached by an impressive carved oak staircase. It opened for business at nine, which meant that servants had to be up much earlier laying fires and cleaning the rooms. Then the queen would hear Mass in the college chapel, which had been given over to her, while the Anglican ladies-in-waiting attended prayers, often walking up to Trinity.

  Behind lay the privy chamber, where the queen could enjoy privacy attended only by her own ladies of the bedchamber. Behind that was a still more private space, the withdrawing chamber, where Henrietta received only a very small and select circle – her confessor, the Countess of Denbigh and other chief favourites. It functioned as a parlour might in a less formal establishment. Behind this was the bedchamber itself.

  The king liked to come and spend the time after midday dinner with the queen, if he wasn’t playing tennis or going hunting in the woods around Oxford. This was when most people crowded into the queen’s apartments. Prince Rupert might drop in; lodged in Laud’s old college, St John’s, he took no notice of any orders but the king’s, and even the latter were interpreted fairly liberally. Rupert was always arguing energetically and vociferously for new and exotic campaign plans. Poets like Abraham Cowley or John Denham might present their barbed verses on the enemy, while Sir William Davenant might compose something more lyrical in praise of the queen. There were always French-speakers, papists, exotics such as Henrietta’s dwarf Jeffrey Hudson and her eccentric lady-in-waiting, Margaret Lucas. The court was always overrun with dogs, not least Rupert’s favourite Boy, but also Henrietta’s many spaniels, especially her beloved Mitte who had been with her in Holland. The room could also be filled by the two tall princes, Charles and James. The godly still found it all scandalously arty. Henrietta liked walking in the college gardens, too, and Oxford had a warm summer that year. The ladies-
in-waiting did a lot of waiting, in both senses; they ran to and fro delivering notes and picking up dropped items.

  They played cards and gossiped and did embroideries and told each other romantic news. The men liked to play cards too, but also lost and won huge sums at dice, tennis and chess. Everyone struggled to keep up the smooth formal patina of pre-war life, to make the court – and especially the queen’s court – a refuge from the conflict, a realm of normality.

  But Oxford was not in a normal state. The effort to keep up appearances, to keep the court functioning, only exposed the changes besieging it. Normalcy was at best a cruel trick.

  Henrietta and Charles had been reunited for only a month when Charles left for the siege of Gloucester, and Henrietta blamed Rupert. She suddenly felt isolated, the illusion of normality torn away. Merton’s walls were part of the city’s outer defences. Henrietta had only to open a window to see the sentries and their cannons. She knew, too, that if Parliament ever took the city then she would be in great danger. She was the one they blamed for everything. She was already charged with high treason, which meant that anyone who killed her would be rewarded, not hanged. Parliament had finally impeached her on 21 June 1643, though she was for the moment out of its reach; people reminded each other that she had never been crowned, and that she had pawned the Crown Jewels, and raised her ‘popish army’. The only serious debate was about how to refer to the woman; some members didn’t want her called queen, but this would mean referring to her by her maiden name, Bourbon, and thus offending the French royal family. Although Henrietta forgave the rebels, and although she had always been realistic about the seriousness of the situation, these new threats were daunting. The constant dread began to wear her down. And as summer turned to autumn, her situation grew worse.

  XIII Newbury Fight

  In July 1643, the Royalists breached the outer line of Bristol’s supposedly impregnable defences. This was to prove the high tide of their fortunes, the heroic climax of the war in the West; Rupert and his men had attacked impetuously rather than besiege Bristol steadily, but luck was with them. However, the godly people of Bristol were not welcoming. One of Bristol’s citizens was Dorothy Hazzard, a devout woman who knew something had to be done. She gathered together two hundred women, and they ran to the city’s vital Frome Gate. They worked with their own hands to strengthen its defences, blocking up the entrance with soil and woolsacks. Then she went to look for the governor, whose backbone was in need of stiffening, urging him to stand firm in the defence of the city, and promising him that she and her women would take their babes in their arms and stand in front of the defending soldiers, ‘to keep off the shot from the soldiers, if they were afraid’. But it was all in vain; lack of ammunition forced the governor to surrender. The result was plunder on an almost apocalyptic scale. Shopkeepers were asked for protection money, and then found that paying one group of soldiers did nothing to prevent attacks by others. The garrison were stripped of all clothing and abused by the incoming Royalists. It was a sign that the rules of civilized warfare were beginning to crumble.

  Every town in England could read the writing on the walls of Bristol. If Bristol could fall, nowhere was very safe. Shouting from its supposedly impregnable defences, the Royalists could not know that they had reached the height of their fortunes. Now, as the chilly autumn of 1643 began, things would get worse. They would fail to take Gloucester, and their armies would once again be driven back from London.

  Battles are sometimes described as if seen by gods, but they are experienced sketchily, in zigzags of noise, light, hand-to-hand fights. The Battle of Newbury can be seen from the heavens, or from the earth. The dichotomy between the ideal straight line and the muddied, muddled reality existed for the Civil War soldier too. After putting on helmet, breastplate and buff-coat, after taking up pike or musket, after drilling, the infantryman was still a vulnerable soft human being.

  Essex had hoped to occupy Newbury, but the Royalists blocked the London road, and occupied it themselves on 19 September 1643, a few hours before Essex and his Parliament-men arrived. The London trained bands and the rest of Essex’s army were forced out into the fields. For the Royalists, Sir Jacob Astley commanded the foot; the king had a little over 14,000 men, and also had twenty guns, sixteen of them brass. He went to bed in Newbury on the night of 19 September in a cheerful frame of mind; he had ample supplies of food, and he had cut the rebels off from London. His troops were mainly comfortably bivouacked, but the Parliamentarians were cold, tired, footsore, homesick and short of food; they were also lying in the fields.

  The Welsh Royalist John Gwynne remembered how tired he was before he reached quarters: ‘we were like to drop down every step we made with want to sleep, yet notwithstandingly we marched on still, until the evening we overtook the enemy’s army at Newbury town’s end; then our quarter-masters, with their party, beat their quarter-masters and their parties of horse out of the town’.

  Essex rode from camp to camp to warn his men of the Royalist advantages, but the army still cheered him as it had at Turnham Green with cries of ‘Hey for Robin’. Their discomfort was a blessing in disguise because it allowed them to occupy the high ground, especially a hill called Round Hill that commanded an impressive field of fire. Skippon, occupying it, opened fire on the Royalists below in the plain to prove this at first light.

  In the morning, one of the Royalist commanders, Lord Digby, realized that the Royalists had to take that hill ‘or there was no holding of the field’; the task was given to the foot regiments of Sir Nicholas Byron’s brigade, but the hill was stoutly defended by Parliamentarians who lined every ditch and hedgerow. Young Edmund Verney was among those who fought with Byron up that stubborn little hill. At one point, Byron noted that his men would have to pass through a gap which allowed only one horseman at a time. He ordered it widened, but even as he did so his horse was wounded.

  It was then that Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland spurred his horse through the gap. As they advanced against musketeers hidden in the hedgerows, a musketball hit him in the stomach and he toppled from his horse; he was dead before he hit the ground. Cary was a brave idealist and intellectual who represented the epitome of moderate Royalism. He was also the eldest son of Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, the Catholic convert and friend to the queen who had also brought up all of her nine children as Catholics, except Lucius. Like his mother, he was physically short and unimpressive, with black eyes and black hair, but he had impressed everyone with his intelligence and idealism. Bulstrode Whitelocke described his actions on the morning of the battle:

  The Lord Falkland, secretary of state, in the morning of the fight called for a clean shirt, and being asked the reason of it, answered that if he were slain in the battle they should not find his body in foul linen. Being dissuaded by his friends to go into the fight, as having no call to it, and being no military officer, he said he was weary of the times, and foresaw much misery to his own country, and did believe he should be out of it ere night, and could not be persuaded to the contrary, but would enter into the battle, and was there slain (in the lanes about Round Hill). His death was much lamented by all that knew him, or heard of him, being a gentleman of great parts, ingenuity, and honour, courteous and just to all, a passionate promoter of all endeavours of peace betwixt the king and parliament.

  Whitelocke may have been right that Falkland, like Sir Edmund Verney, was actively seeking a battlefield death. He had been reckless before at Gloucester, and he had volunteered for the front rank of Byron’s regiment. For John Aubrey, Falkland threw his life away because he was overcome with remorse at having persuaded the king to besiege Gloucester, which Aubrey thought so weakened the army that it lost the war. Falkland was also miserable about the loss of his mistress, Mrs Moray ‘whom he loved above all creation’. His corpse was battered and mangled in the action, but Aubrey says it was recognized by a mole on the back of the neck.

  Byron forced the gap himself, and found it deadly: ‘[the enemy
] entertained us with a great salvo of musket shot, and discharged their two drakes upon us laden with case shot, which killed some and hurt many of my men’. The Royalists were blinded by smoke and obstructed by tall hedges, but they struggled on, working across farmland, one field at a time; as they approached Round Hill, the Parliamentarians opened fire with their muskets, and the hedgerows bristled with dragoons. More than a hundred men fell from Byron’s own regiment alone. At one point Byron’s horsemen reached the crest of the hill, and captured a few guns, but their success was to be short-lived.

  What turned the tide was, once again, the London trained bands, commanded by the ever-reliable Philip Skippon, who threw them in to reinforce the tired lines, and they pushed the exhausted Royalists back down the long slope. They had good cannon and a field of fire which let them use it. The Royalists also managed to get fire up to the Parliamentarians, but the Parliament-men stood firm, holding back waves of cavalry with their pikes and muskets. Some Royalist troops lost their nerve completely. ‘They found a hillock … that sheltered them from the enemies’ cannon’, lay down behind it, ‘and would not be drawn a foot from thence’, wrote a disgusted observer. Sir John Byron said later that ‘had not our foot played the poltroons extremely that day, we in all probability could have won the war’.

  They had fought for twelve hours, and something like 3500 men lay dead on the field. The Royalists, who were down to their last ten barrels of powder, had no choice but to withdraw, leaving Essex in command of the field. They had been short of powder ever since the siege of Gloucester, in late summer, and had lost more when Essex captured their magazine at Cirencester. From there, Essex’s army marched cheerfully on to Reading. The trained bands went on to London, reaching it on 25 September and receiving a heroes’ welcome. They deserved it, but in their absence Essex could not hold Reading, which fell again to the Royalists. It still counted as a victory.