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

by Diane Purkiss

  XVI Two Marriages

  While the people of the three kingdoms fought, the world was changing. On the other side of the world, a Dutchman named Abel Tasman was exploring the northern coasts of what would turn out to be Australia. The Manchus invaded China and removed the Ming dynasty from power. And in Paris, René Descartes published his Philosophical Principles, written in Latin. From Virginia came news that the planters had fallen out among themselves, some supporting the king and others Parliament. They even began arming, but ‘the Indians, perceiving this, took advantage of so fit an opportunity, and came suddenly upon them, and cruelly massacred about fifteen hundred’.

  1644 was a year when England would be invaded, successfully, from the north, by a Scottish army. It was a year when an army of Englishmen would be destroyed in the West Country. It would see the rise of Montrose and the fall of Essex. And there were great set-piece battles, at Marston Moor and Lostwithiel and Second Newbury. John Milton would defend the free press with words sinewy and powerful enough to be still audible to the Founding Fathers. And it was a year when John Bunyan marched to war with his local militia, thus gaining the practical experience as a soldier that would help him to inspire those mired in the trenches of the First World War with his Pilgrim’s Progress.

  It was a year when the sound of organs vanished from churches when Parliament ordered them all destroyed, and the Globe theatre, once the home of Shakespeare’s plays, was finally demolished on 15 April 1644, and much-needed houses were built on the site. William Lilly published his almanac, too. It stunned the nation with its brilliant predictions: Lilly saw a ‘troubled and divided court’ and ‘an afflicted kingdom’.

  It was the year when the Strand Maypole, the only place in London from which you could hail a cab, was pulled down as a pagan survival. Perhaps it was typical of London cabbies to adopt a pagan fertility symbol as their meeting-point. It was not only the old cabbies’ mark that came down that year. At Canterbury the rich gold and silver embroidered cloth called the glory-cloth, recently made for the high altar, ‘to usher in the breaden god of Rome, and idolatry’, was burnt. Robert Harley’s committee took evidence from the embroiderer, John Rowell. His life’s work was gone.

  It was a year in which many families suffered and some broke under the strain. The sound of the fabric of family life tearing was not necessarily audible in the House of Commons or at the court in Oxford, but after the war some people said that all the discontent had been caused by wives disobeying husbands or daughters defying fathers, that the fabric of society itself had unravelled. The story of Susan Denton’s controversial marriage shows how the war could create opportunities for defiance and power that had not existed before its onset.

  The Denton family was one of those torn by the war. John Denton was a colonel who served the king until he was killed, and William Denton was a court physician, and a keen Royalist, as was his sister, Elizabeth Isham. But their cousin John Hampden was one of the Five Members, and he was also a cousin of Mary Verney, Parliamentarian Ralph Verney’s wife. So it was typical of the Dentons that one daughter should fall in love with her family’s stoutest defender, and another with the man who had tried to destroy their home. The Dentons were about to experience war as the rupturing of their family solidarity and sense of identity.

  Elizabeth Isham’s ardent Royalism didn’t make her enthusiastic about having soldiers quartered in her medieval manor, Hillesden House in Buckinghamshire. Strictly speaking, Hillesden was not her house. But with her husband imprisoned she had no other home, and her family took her in; all over the kingdoms, families were quietly bailing out homeless or helpless relatives in this way. Having been dispossessed already by the war, Elizabeth felt passionately possessive about Hillesden. The first soldiers to visit were Parliament-men. ‘There is one hundred men’, she wrote, desperately, ‘in our one house, which me thinks is very hard to be put in one house, and we being almost 50 in the family.’ The reason Elizabeth saw so many soldiers was that her home lay between the Royalist capital at Oxford, and Newport Pagnell, held by Parliament. In February 1644 Colonel Smith took command of it for the Royalists, and turned it into a makeshift fort, with barns for cavalry and a defensive trench. Smith’s soldiers plundered the nearby countryside, and one day brought in cattle and horses which led to a violent quarrel and then a mutiny among the troops; one officer, Major Amnion, claimed all of the horses for himself. The owner of the cattle, a tenant of John Hampden, demanded payment; instead, he was himself made to pay for the return of his animals. This angry man went to the Parliamentary Committee in Aylesbury. Thus the Parliamentarians came to know that Royalist forces were gathering at Hillesden.

  At first Sir Samuel Luke, in command at Newport Pagnell, tried a quick surprise assault on the house, and then prepared for a real attack. They amassed 2000 men under their tough, unsparing leader, Colonel Oliver Cromwell, a force which marched out on 4 March 1644. The Royalists at Hillesden dug in. They made a cannon, fetched some ordnance from Oxford. They also used labourers to dig the defensive ditch deeper. But before they could make much progress, the Parliamentarians under Cromwell were upon them. The ditches were only knee deep in most places, useless as protection against musket fire, let alone cannon, and the attackers pushed the defenders back to the church. The Royalist commander Smith surrendered, on promise of quarter. All the prisoners were marched off to Padbury, where they passed the night in some discomfort. Later reports, of questionable reliability, said they had been brutally used, some killed.

  Then the victorious Parliamentarian soldiers began on the house. The morning after the surrender, a trooper struck the butt of his musket against the wainscot, and gold coins poured out. More treasure was found hidden under the roof. Later, though, the search was interrupted by news that more Royalist troops were coming, and with that Luke and his men set fire to the house. The town too was burned. ‘We were not shamefully used by the soldiers,’ Pen Verney wrote, ‘but they took everything and I was not left scarce the clothes on my back.’ Elizabeth said that everyone was talking about how ‘Hillesden Park pales be every one up and burned or else carried away, and the Denton children like to beg’.

  Susan Denton was no longer young, and a spinster, but something about her caught the eye and heart of one of the besiegers of Hillesden, a man called Jeremiah Abercrombie, a Covenanter, a foreigner, and a foe, and a captain in the army engaged in destroying what had been Susan’s home. It was more Persuasion than Pride and Prejudice – two older, steadier people nonetheless carried away by passion. The courtship, the falling in love, can only have happened in the few hours in which the women of Hillesden walked across the sodden fields, crying as they went, to the refuge of Claydon. Only two days later, on 6 March 1644, John Denton, younger brother of Alexander the master, wrote, ‘My sister Susan, her new husband [meaning fiancé] Capt. Abercrombie is quartered at Addington, and I fear to the endanger of bringing the house into the condition of Hillesdon.’

  In June Jeremiah was still ‘upon service’, but Elizabeth could record, ‘My sister Susan’s marriage is to be accomplished very suddenly if her captain be not killed, it is him as did first plunder Hillesdon.’ The two clauses, jammed together, show how amazed and horrified Elizabeth still was by the romance. But at least he was a good catch, Elizabeth thought. ‘The captain his land is in Ireland, he is half Scots, half Irish. I think few of her friends like it, but if she hath not him she will never have any, it is gone so far.’

  But their married happiness was shortlived. The following year, 1645, in a letter maddeningly devoid of specific dates, Henry Verney wrote that Jeremiah had been killed by a party from nearby Boarstall, and buried in the churchyard at Hillesden. He had by the time of his death become part of the family, church and landscape he had once tried to destroy.

  Meanwhile Sir Alexander’s son John was killed at Abingdon on 7 August 1645, in one of many unsuccessful attempts by the Royalists to retake the town and secure Oxford. Elizabeth described it: ‘They came on
so gallantly as there took the pikes out of the enemies’ hands, and then a drake went off and killed him in the place, and seven bullets were found in his breast, and beside himself they was but 7 or 8 killed, none of note but him, for they all retreated when they see him fall.’ Sir Ralph Verney tried to comfort Alexander: ‘he lived and died most gallantly, and questionless is now most happy; kings must pile up their crowns at the gates of the grave, and lay down their sceptres at the feet of Death, then let not us poor subjects think or desire to be exempted; length of days doth oftener make our sins the greater than our lives the better’.

  Another romance was burgeoning in the ashes of Hillesden. Colonel Smith, once the defender of the house, had begun to court one of the two daughters of the house, Margaret Denton. ‘One son is dead,’ wrote Elizabeth, with her usual bluntness, ‘yet another son-in-law he hath this month or five weeks, for Colonel Smith is married to his daughter Margaret, and I think will be a happy match if these ill times do not hinder it, but he is still a Prisoner. So you may think it a bold venture, but if these times hold, I think they will be no men left for women.’ Later still, the romance took a new turn. Elizabeth, with the help of Susan Verney, who was naturally sympathetic to the lovers, helped Smith to escape from prison, and they found themselves imprisoned on a charge of aiding and abetting him. Elizabeth hated prison. ‘They would not let me have so much as a pen and ink, but all of us were innocent prisoners, and so came out without examining, for none could have a word against us; your sister Susan and my nice niece were my fellow prisoners, and for our own persons no hurt, only our purses paid the fees.’ Luckily, they were helped by Thomas Verney and his wife. Elizabeth had heard, too, that they were to be moved, but she said that for all she knew it might be to the Summer Islands. She commented, too, that the guards read her letters. Susan wrote, too: ‘I make no doubt but you have heard that I was taken prisoner, for Bess tells me that she wrote you word of it. I am now released, but this day my keeper was with me to tell me the judge advocate was angry that I was released … It was thought I had a hand in helping my new cousin out of prison, but indeed I had not – I hope that I may never undertake to do any such thing whereby I may bring myself in trouble,’ she adds, not especially nobly.

  The Denton family’s story was one of loss. John was gone and Hillesden House was destroyed. Alexander was broken, and his family soon lost him too. He finally died in prison, on New Year’s Day 1646. He was only forty-eight years old, but one of the many fevers that ran like fire through England’s crowded gaols attacked his weakened body. He was buried near his family – and near Jeremiah Abercrombie, the man who was partial author of the turmoils that killed him. Sleeping in the quiet earth, their strife was at an end.

  Another marriage that cut across the divisions made by the war was brewing for John Milton. Milton was the product of his turbulent age. Preoccupied as a young man with the Gunpowder Plot, he wrote four epigrams and a long and ambitious Latin epic on the subject early in his career. He was the oracular poet of the hard-working, godly, mercantile London citizenry, who saw themselves increasingly menaced by papists at court and abroad, and for him and his family and friends, the Gunpowder Plot was both the incarnation of their worst nightmares and solid proof that they were right to be afraid. All his life Milton would be preoccupied with the menace of Rome. There were two kinds of terror that stalked his world: the terror of sin, of becoming a reprobate oneself, and the terror of being overwhelmed by ungodly powers arrayed against the godly.

  Milton feared for the nation and the Church, but not for himself. This seemed like arrogance; Milton felt sure he at least was elect, though he struggled to avoid saying so for fear of seeming presumptuous. He was haunted by a different dread, one that arose just as inexorably from the crowded and narrow street, the bustling city which bred him. He feared anonymity, being unheard, disappearing into a sea of chatter and hurrying people.

  There were reasons for fear of early obliteration. The young Milton grew up in a family that saw itself as fighting on the front line of a faltering spiritual crusade, wrestling not against fellow-men, but against the rulers of the darkness of this world. The Milton family were squeezed into a house in crowded and narrow Bread Street. The house, variously called The Spread Eagle and The White Bear, stood in a street of similar buildings; London surveyor John Stow says they were mainly the homes of clothiers, but things had deteriorated since his survey and the street’s population had rocketed due to the scarcity of London housing. The house did not belong solely to the Milton family; Milton’s father leased the lower floors to some London tradesmen, and the upper floor to other lodgers. Milton’s grandmother lived with the family until Milton was three, and there were apprentices and servants, too.

  His father was a notary, financial adviser, moneylender and contract lawyer, and a member of the Company of Scriveners. He had grown up in a yeoman family in the Oxfordshire village of Stanton St John, and his own father, a devout Roman Catholic, had paid recusancy fines all his life. The family story ran that John Milton Senior converted to Protestantism in secret, and was disinherited and thrown out of home when his father caught him reading the Bible in English. John Milton was himself a veteran of the war against popery, having conducted his own secret guerrilla campaign while still a child. And yet Milton Senior was also more than a scrivener and a godly member of the congregation. He was a former choirboy and composer, and in 1611 he composed an In Nomine for a Polish prince visiting London, for which he was rewarded with a gold medal. Perhaps to make amends, Milton’s new composition was The Teares and Lamentations of a Sorrowful Soule, published in 1613, a setting of some versions of the psalms produced by Sir William Leighton while languishing in debtor’s prison.

  John Milton was born on 9 December 1608, the child of an older mother, Sara, whose father had been a merchant tailor, another sturdy tradesman. We know very little about Sara Milton; biographers mostly content themselves with remarking that she was a good mother and a fine housewife. Milton himself calls her probatissima, most virtuous, and says she was known for her charity to the poor. But John Aubrey says she had very bad eyesight, and ‘used spectacles presently after she was thirty years old’; he plainly thinks she bequeathed this affliction to her son. He had an older sister called Anne, and a younger brother, Christopher, baptized 1615. He also had two sisters who died in infancy: Sara, named after her mother, christened on 15 July 1612, and buried on 6 August, and Tabitha, baptized on 30 January 1615, and buried on 3 August. These losses may explain Milton’s preoccupation with the menace of early death, his fear of being silenced before he had a chance to make his voice heard.

  Bread Street opened onto at least two other worlds. One was All Hallows Church, with its community of merchant saints. The fathers were worthy, diligent, business-like. The rector, Richard Stock, was not a well-educated man, but rough, direct, sensible. He himself said he was slow to absorb what he read. He liked diatribes against Catholics, and he too was godly, eagerly cleansing the Church of England of any remaining traces of the years of popery. In 1606, in response to the Gunpowder Plot, he translated into English William Whitaker’s Answer to the Ten Reasons of Edmund Campion the Jesuit, and the very fact that it was considered necessary to go on refuting Campion, who had been dead for almost thirty years, shows how immediate the threat of Jesuits seemed. John had his own copy of the Bible by the age of four.

  The other was St Paul’s Grammar School, to which John went when about twelve years old. The school was only a few streets away from Bread Street, but it was spacious in size and ample in learning, with a vast library. The pupils sat on benches along a great hall, which could be divided into two by a velvet curtain so the younger boys were separate from the older boys. The seating arrangements were as in church, and also like the House of Commons, which of course met in what had once been a church. But here, the most privileged seat was not accorded to rank, but to merit. The boy who did best in each form had a special privilege: his own tiny desk and chair,
set apart from the others. This arrangement helped form Milton’s belief in an English republic governed by the best minds, a meritocracy. Incredibly, the school was free, though boys had to be able to read and write in Latin and English to be admitted. Then as now, St Paul’s was a pressurecooker for the scrambling sons of the London merchants who hoped their children would do just a little better, rise just a little higher than they had. Competition to sit at that tiny desk set apart must have been ferocious.

  John could walk to school past the booksellers’ stalls in Paul’s Yard, which were rather like the bouquinistes on the Rive Gauche in the early years of last century. He would also pass the preachers denouncing theatre and heresy at Paul’s Cross. If he took the well-established shortcut through the cathedral itself, known as Paul’s Walk, he might have tripped over the sleeping forms of the aspirant writers hunkered down there when short of business or patrons. The world of writing was open, but it had its dangers.

  At St Paul’s Milton was taught by Alexander Gill, an intelligent scholar of Latin and Greek, but irritable and prone to administering excessive beatings. Aubrey described him as given to ‘whipping fits’. But Gill also loved English poetry, especially Spenser, whom he called ‘our Homer’, and Wither ‘our Juvenal’. Milton made friends with Gill’s son, a gifted Latin poet who wrote a joyful celebration of the death of over ninety Roman Catholics when the room in which they said Mass at Blackfriars collapsed in October 1623. This event became a major feature of anti-Catholic propaganda, and even on the afternoon in question the crowd that gathered mostly consisted of those eager to hurl curses at the victims rather than those eager to rescue them.

  John’s closest friend was a boy called Charles Diodati, whose father was a doctor and whose uncle was a Calvinist theologian. The problem with Diodati was that he was one of those boys who are outstandingly and precociously good at everything. He was awarded his Master’s degree while Milton was still working on his Bachelor’s, and published a long Latin poem while Milton was still at school. Two letters of his to Milton survive, both in Greek. He was also lively, witty, and charming. He was, in other words, exactly the kind of boy to induce an inferiority complex in his fellows. Perhaps he contributed to Milton’s lifelong anxiety about whether he was doing enough, moving fast enough, developing enough. It began at Paul’s, and soon John’s father was instructing one of the maids to sit up with John while he read, determinedly, ecstatically, desperately – until midnight or later. His head ached and his eyes burned, but he was also on fire with his sense of God’s mission for him and his family, a mission that went with and required worldly success.