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

by Diane Purkiss

  Charles still had a few friends in London, and in the summer of 1642, several prominent Londoners had sent help to the king. But as they saw the kingdom’s divisions deepen into war, the truly loyal left to join him. At Oxford they formed a band of embittered political exiles. By 1643, the king could form a company of horse from London citizens. Later, Basing House was garrisoned in part by escaped and ‘resting’ actors, since the London playhouses were closed in September 1642. Also present were artists, print-sellers and other members of the capital’s cultured classes. Inigo Jones was captured there when it fell to Cromwell at the end of the war.

  Humphrey Mildmay nevertheless managed to live as a Royalist in London. When the war broke out, he had fifteen children and a house in Clerkenwell, from which he liked to walk out to shop at Newgate Market or to buy books in Duck Lane. He liked to eat his dinner in taverns, with friends, which involved consuming a good deal of wine. He also liked his friends to visit him at home, and he liked to send them away ‘mad, merry and late also’. He loved theatres, especially the Cockpit, the Globe, and Blackfriars; but they were closed, so he and others had to make do with printed playtexts and the odd clandestine performance. He hated November: ‘frost, dry and hard, with a great mist for the thieves’ and he hated it mainly because it kept him at home ‘in a sad day of rain all day’. At times he hardly seemed to notice that the war was going on.

  But for others the war was a sterner presence. John Milton called London ‘the shop of war’, with citizens flocking to the Guildhall to lend their silver and gold, arms and jewellery. Anna Trapnel was among them; she gave her jewels and plate to the army. They may not have been large or valuable, but she felt the gesture united her fortunes to the army’s, made them almost one. Thousands of horses – even coach-horses – were brought in for the soldiers. It may have helped that the army was commanded by the Earl of Essex, popular in the capital, and resident just outside Temple Bar. He was also a symbol of the injustice of the court; three generations of his family were seen as its successive victims.

  Having conspicuously failed to conquer London, the Royalists never gave up hope of subversion. Messengers, scouts and spies, including ‘certain adventurous women’ concealing secret dispatches in their voluminous skirts, passed to and fro, often using High Wycombe as their base. Money was sent to the king, and messages to London, including the crucial declaration of October 1642 that royal pardon was offered to any erring subjects who would lay down their arms. Lady D’Aubigny, widow of one of the glamorous and valiant Stuart brothers, cousins of the king, who had been killed at Edgehill, was taken to London to give official backing to the activities of the chief conspirators.

  So Parliament’s fear that the women peace protesters were female spies was not utterly without foundation. But were the merchantwomen right to say the war was crushing them economically? Certainly the war disrupted London’s coal supplies. There was a switch to wood, which was scarcer and more expensive, and this disrupted trades like glassmaking that needed fuel, and also – crucially – firearm manufacture. Things improved enormously when the Scots captured Newcastle in October 1644, agreeing to release the coal. This was fortunate, because the winter of 1645–6 was savagely cold, with the Thames frozen above London Bridge. Shipbuilding was affected too, so the pace of trade in Anna Trapnel’s Poplar slowed catastrophically, with a decline in the production of East Indiamen and the river full of laid-up merchant ships. Other trades were affected by the absence of men at the war; Nehemiah Wharton was not the only apprentice to join the army. Trade routes were also badly affected, especially in 1643, by Royalist control of the west and south. Those particularly handicapped included the clothing and luxury trades, which had also lost the lucrative court market. On the other hand, Parliament sitting constantly boosted local economy and housing demands. With the suspension of the Licensing Act, print and newspapers flourished. Besides, refugees from towns that had declared for Parliament and been sacked by the Royalist armies began to arrive in London once the shooting war began.

  With them, more godly folk arrived. London was full of preachers who felt themselves unsafe in hostile towns and villages. The united voice of anti-popery was dividing and multiplying into what would become a fan of radical sects. Nehemiah Wallington was bewildered by the sheer number of Puritan preachers flooding into London. As he galloped from Joseph Caryl to Hugh Peter, Wallington worried that he should really be somewhere else. Religious exiles who had emigrated during the Laudian years suddenly returned. More refugees flooded in after the fall of Bristol to the Royalists in 1643. London’s godly tried to follow it all; the Bohemian intellectual Jan Comenius described Londoners listening to sermons and making shorthand notes so they could think about it hard afterwards. But at the same time many excuses for not leading a truly pious life were suddenly removed, and this increased the pressure on the godly. If the person Nehemiah had heard preaching did not inspire him, he blamed himself. At a prayer vigil on an all-day fast day, he lamented that ‘Mr Roborough did pray so heavenly and preach so profitably, yet my heart would not yield … yet did I remain dead and drowsy, the day being very irksome and duties very tedious unto me, like unto one that never knew or heard of God’. One reason for his deadness might have been exhaustion, for Nehemiah Wallington was working man. He had an entire household to support by his trade, servants and children and wife. He was exactly the sort of man who had never met Charles Stuart, and was never likely to understand or be understood by him.

  Nehemiah Wallington tended to see history in grand cosmic terms, as a struggle by the righteous against the deceits and plots of sinister and violent papists. For him and for many of his fellow-citizens, papists were fearsome and secretive. He recorded carefully what was said to be the speech made by the Catholic Lord Paulet to his soldiers at Sherborne, ‘give no quarter to none that wears the sword … Deafen your ears and harden your hearts against all cries and prayers for mercy. But if you meet with any of their clergy, reserve them for more exquisite torments … I intend to have them flayed alive … [and] when you come to the Puritan towns – Taunton, Crewkerne, Bristol, Dorchester and Exeter – then let your swords cruel it without difference of age, sex or degree.’ This kind of talk inflamed Nehemiah. Having begun the war with some faith in the king, he responded to propaganda, some of which consisted of the king’s own unwise statements on religion. He faithfully transcribed a letter which claimed Charles ‘hates the Puritan party’ and diligently noted every single reported Royalist atrocity. ‘The most savage cruelties at Bradford and Leeds’, he wrote indignantly. By contrast he recorded the triumphs of ‘our army’.

  If Nehemiah wanted to get news, he could go out into London and buy it; some of the letters he copied diligently circulated from hand to hand, but such letters were being printed before long, and by 1643 many newspapers existed which could give opinionated accounts of the conflict, as well as news of other matters. With the lifting of censorship, all kinds of things could be said which would have been forbidden before the conflict. The sudden explosion of books, like the sudden explosion of preaching, was both heady and confusing. George Thomason, who tried to collect a copy of every book printed, amassed 2134 in 1642, and in the 1640s as a whole he collected 4044 newsbooks. (Not all of them were for Parliament; Royalist newspapers such as Mercurius Aulicus were smuggled into the city.)

  The newsbooks were as vital to Parliament as any army or weapon, because they made men like Nehemiah Wallington believe in the cause. But Londoners also built a network of siege defences that became one of the largest urban defensive enclosures in early modern Europe. Men like Wallington, who followed the news, were anxious about a Royalist siege, because of the sack of Magdeburg in 1631, the news of which was still vivid in the 1640s. Especially the citizens feared Prince Rupert, called Prince Robber, who had served in Germany. The siege and capture of Bristol did nothing to reassure them. There was also fear of a Royalist uprising to seize the city; those living within the lines were asked to take an oat
h not to give intelligence of the defences to the enemy or to take part in any unlawful assemblies and tumults. The Venetian ambassador said ‘the shape they [the forts] take betrays that they are not only for defence against the royal armies, but also against tumults of the citizens and to ensure a prompt obedience upon all occasions’. Despite these fears, Turnham Green was the only time the Royalists came within striking distance of the capital. A captured document used by Parliament for propaganda related that the queen believed the conquest of London would end the war, while the king’s own propaganda stressed his intention to capture London, blockading the Thames below the city and occupying the Essex and Kent shores. Information like this meant that Nehemiah and others felt constantly on a war footing.

  So did all the drilling and levying they could see around them. On 10 August 1642 ‘Directions for the defence of London’ were issued. They contained a provision for the construction of fortifications, and for ‘a good proportion of horse about the city and 4 or 500 young men trained and exercised in the city’, and for men to go from house to house in London to discover the allegiance of the occupants. About the time of Edgehill, Parliament ordered the trained bands to ready themselves, and the posting of troops to defend the approaches to London. During the initial stages of construction, that tirelessly curious Catholic gentleman Sir Kenelm Digby was discovered in disguise observing the building of works at Mile End and was arrested. He was not the only Royalist to investigate the new defences. John Webb, the Deputy Surveyor of Works, managed to take down details of the Parliamentarian fortifications and to send them to the king.

  In December 1642 John Evelyn visited London to see ‘that celebrated line of communication’, but he left no description of what he saw. The Venetian ambassador saw the main forts completed in May 1643, and thought them admirably well designed, while in April 1643 the Scottish traveller William Lithgow toured the defences, and described them in detail; twenty-eight works with inner and outer defences. Extraordinarily, he was allowed to publish his description, but this may have been because the man known as ‘lying Lithgow’ would not have been regarded as a reliable source. Regrettably, his is the only detailed description to survive.

  Several writers paint a picture of the enthusiastic willingness of Londoners to take part in the work on the fortifications; the Venetian ambassador said 20,000 people were working on them daily, without pay. He commented that ‘the people do not even cease to work on a Sunday, which is so strictly observed by Puritans’. A Perfect Diurnall reported stirringly that even the great left their homes to toil on the building work: ‘a great company of the common council and diverse other chief men of the city’. The autumn of 1642 was very cold, with early frosts, and there was snow in December, while the following months were very wet, with some flooding. The Royalists tried to suggest that all this digging was funny with a song called ‘Roundheaded cuckolds come dig’. Rushworth thought the diggers were animated by ‘terror of the citizens’; shops were ordered to shut in London and Westminster so people could help with the digging. The works nevertheless damaged farmland, and some buildings were destroyed to make way for the fortifications.

  London was a city on the defensive, even though there was no enemy army in sight. Its citizens had begun the war believing they were under attack; from the king’s counsellors, from papists at court and in the Church, from the king himself as his powers expanded. As the system of forts was completed, it was understandable that their defences did not make them feel safer, but confirmed their sense that they were under siege from without and within. The divisions created by their dread would ultimately splinter their side.

  XV The Bitterness of War

  At the tiny village of Barthomley in Cheshire, at Christmastide in 1643, there was a massacre so notorius that it was used as part of Charles’s eventual indictment for treason. Yet to this day no one is quite sure what happened or why. A bald newsbook account gives one version:

  The King’s party coming to Barthomley Church, did set upon the same [the church]; wherein about twenty neighbours were gone for their safeguard. But Major Connaught, major to Colonel Snayde, (whom they in the church did take for the Lord Brereton) with his forces by welcome entered the Church. The people within got up into the steeple; But the enemy burning forms, pews, rushes & the like, did smother them in the Steeple, that they were enforced to call for quarter, and yield themselves; which was granted them by the said Connaught, But when he had them in his power, he caused them all to be stripped stark naked; and most barbarously & contrary to the laws of arms, murdered, stabbed and cut the Throats of xii [12] of them, viz, Mr John Fowler (scholar), Henry Fowler, Mr Thomas Elcocke, James Boughey, Randall Hassall, Richard Steele, & Richard Steble, Willm Steele, George Burrowes, Thomas Hollinsm James Butler, & Richard Cawel, & wounded all the reste, leaving many of them for dead. And on Christmas Day, and St Steven’s day, they continued plundering & destroying all Barthomley, Crewe, Haslington, the places adjacent, taking all their goods, victuals, Clothes, and stripped many, both men abd women, almost naked.

  The fact that the people massacred were in a church, that there was no hotblooded battle, added to the horror. In other accounts, what happened at Barthomley is part of a campaign of destruction and plunder:

  The enemy, now drawing nearer to the town [Nantwich] spread themselves into Stoke, Hurleston, Brindley, Wrensbury, and all the country about, robbing and plundering everywhere, till December 22 [1643] … Connought cut the throat of Mr John Fowler, a hopeful [promising] young man, and a minor, and only three of them escaped miraculously the last being cruelly wounded. Christmas-day, and the day after, they plundered Barthomley, Crewe, Haslington and Sandbach, of goods and clothes, and stripped naked both men and women.

  But was Barthomley really a massacre of unarmed villagers? In 1859, the local vicar recorded the memoirs of one of the village’s oldest inhabitants, who remembered that his father had said that he had, in turn, heard from his grandfather that the massacre had a cause. ‘The son of the rector fired from the steeple upon the troops marching past, and killed one of them; this so irritated the others, that they revenged themselves by butchering many within the church.’ This man’s greatgrandfather was, he said, one of the three who escaped the slaughter.

  A thrilling secret? Or a Royalist rector? For alas, the man who wrote the story down eagerly accuses the Barthomley victims of complicity and ultra-Puritanism. But the contemporary accounts are very plainly not especially godly, because they are using the old calendar, referring to Christmas and even St Stephen’s Day. We may never learn what caused the atrocity, but it was not a simple matter of religion.

  There is another source, too. Throughout the war, newspapers seized letters and printed them, from the letters of London wives begging their husbands to come home printed triumphantly by the Royalist Mercurius Aulicus to the reports of commanders. Lord John Byron’s letter about the Barthomley massacre was intercepted and delivered into the hands of the Parliamentarians, where it was promptly printed in the newspaper Mercurius Civicus. The letter was to the Marquis of Newcastle, and in it Byron tries to justify his actions: ‘the Rebels had possessed themselves of Church at Batumley, but we presently beat them forth of it. I put them all to the Sword; which I find to be the best way to proceed with these kinds of people, for mercy to them is cruelty.’

  Editorial comment was militant: ‘Such actions and resolutions were fitter for a Cannibal then a Christian, a Gentleman, or a Soldier, but I hope that now, when our men see what they must trust to from this new Lord, and the cost of the Popish party, they will resolve to run the greatest hazards rather than to fall into their hands.’

  The deaths at Barthomley became, and remained, a recruiting poster, but that does not rob them of their tragic impact. To notice that we can never know the absolute truth of events there is to recognize that some of what we ‘know’ of this war is broken, fragmentary, and in some cases the result of ‘spin’ and propaganda. In Barthomley’s case, we are
lucky to know enough to be certain that we cannot be certain. How many other events, recounted with confidence, might appear just as blurry and unsatisfying if more rather than less evidence about them survived?

  To understand the suffering created by the war, we have to be willing to enter the splinters of broken lives, to meet just for a few seconds people whose world was being destroyed.

  Sometimes civilian suffering was so extreme that it induced madness. William Summers said that his wife ‘hath been distracted’ since their son died in the war and she lost all her possessions. A maid who witnessed the massacre of the garrison of Hopton Castle in Herefordshire suffered from mental trauma all her life. Most pathetic was the case of Lady Jordan, who was caught in the siege of Cirencester in February 1643. There was a heavy bombardment with a large-calibre gun, and a terrible sack afterwards. Lady Jordan never recovered, but became childlike; she was happy only when playing with her dolls.

  A sack was the most likely occasion for civilians to be terrorized. Rape was of course an obvious accompaniment. As early as the battle at Brentford in 1642 such events were reported: ‘the divided pieces of a woman abused to death’ were discovered, and acted as a kind of silent recruitment speech. ‘Our soldiers are not so modest with ladies in their plundering, neither of the king’s side nor the parliament’s, when they are once at work’, complained Edward Read in a letter to Sir John Coke. War ‘enforceth the Mother to behold the ravishment of her own daughter’, whereas peace ‘shields the wife from Soldiers’ force, keeps virgins undefiled’, thought a pamphlet which urged the nation towards peace. Nehemiah Wallington noted that ‘the virgins in Norwich, hearing of the Cavaliers’ violent outrages committed upon their sex wheresoever they got the victory, are so sensible of their reputations, that they have readily contributed so much money as both raised and armed a goodly troop of horse for their defence, which is called the Maiden’s Troop’. Wallington’s comments may be a tribute to the effectiveness of propaganda rather than to the frequency of assault, but it does show how much rape was dreaded. It was also especially associated with Prince Rupert and his cavalry, perhaps part of a not altogether unfair sense that they were rather undisciplined.