Three years later, Parliament, by now in control, ordered £200 a week to be set aside for the relief of the wounded of Lyme, and of the widows and children. This the Puritan John Vicars, in his history Gods Arke, described as ‘a good piece of State-Charity’. And Vicars gives us too the reaction of that unfortunate maid who lost her hand in the fire. When asked how she would now earn her livelihood, she is said to have replied: ‘Truly, I am glad with all my heart that I had a hand to lose for Jesu Christ, for whose Cause I am as willing and ready to lose not only my other hand but my life also.’54
Vicars described this as ‘A sweet and most Saint-like speech indeed’, and perhaps it was. Or perhaps the tone, far from being one of sweet submission, was one of belligerence, new belligerence.
1In 1774 John Hutchins wrote of Corfe Castle in his History of Dorset, ‘The vast fragments of the King’s Tower, the round towers, leaning as if ready to fall, the broken walls and vast pieces of them tumbled down into the vale below, form such a scene of havock and desolation as strike every curious spectator with horror and concern.’25 The curious spectator today will find the scene scarcely changed.
2Ned’s subsequent distinguished career – as Sir Edward Harley – eschewing the extremism of both Roundheads and Royalists, and sitting for Parliament throughout the reign of Charles II. would have heartened his adoring mother. It was his son and Brilliana’s grandson, another Robert Harley, who was that celebrated Tory politician of the reign of Queen Anne.
CHAPTER TEN
His Comrade
Her Husband was a Souldier, and to the wars did go,
And she would be his Comrade, the truth of all is so.
‘The Gallant She-Souldier’, 1655
‘In my poor judgement these times can bring no good end to them’, wrote Sir Ralph Verney’s aunt, Margaret (Poulteney) Eure on the eve of the war: ‘all that women can do is to pray for better, for sure it is an ill time with them of all creatures, for they are exposed to all villainies’. Three years later, when the first phase of the hostilities was ending, a pamphlet entitled The Scourge of Civil War and the Blessing of Peace seemed to indicate that Margaret Eure’s gloomy prophecy had been fulfilled: war was said to have enforced the mother to behold the ravishment of her own daughter, and made the sister mingle her tears with her brother’s blood; on a more mundane level, it was said to bring ‘A Famine of Bread, Virtue scarce and nothing public but disorder’.1
The helplessness of the female in wartime – falling on her knees in prayer for want of anything better to do to protect herself – was another article of conventional belief like her lack of courage; her passive suffering was colourfully, even gleefully, described by both sides in the usual propagandist style.
In fact the women who lived through the period of the Civil Wars were far from passive. Fund-raising was one activity: women brought their jewellery to the Guildhall to aid the Parliamentary cause. In London, Canterbury, Coventry and Norwich, women formed committees to raise funds for troops of horse for Parliament. These were known in consequence as Virgin or Maiden Troops: Cromwell took the Norwich Maiden Troop into his own regiment in August 1643; ‘I thank God for stirring up the youth (your men and maids) to cast in their mite’, he wrote.2
Then as spies or ‘intelligencers’, or simple emissaries, women had a mobility often denied to the other sex. Lady Byron, for example, was able to escape from the siege of Chester in December 1645 and ask the King (then at Oxford) for assistance. An unknown ‘poor woman’ at Portsmouth acted as an agent between Charles I and Henrietta Maria at the beginning of the war. The handsome red-haired Jane Whorwood played a more sustained part in the efforts to free the King from his various places of detention and imprisonment. As such she earned the praise of Anthony à Wood for being ‘the most loyal person to King Charles I in his miseries, as any woman in England’.3 Indeed Jane Whorwood’s various attempts to come to the King’s assistance, by their very nature, could hardly have been undertaken by a member of the opposite sex.
At the beginning of the war Jane Whorwood was twenty-seven years old. Red hair was generally censured in the seventeenth century (traditionally it was a witch’s colour; it was also to be avoided in a wet-nurse for fear of sour milk) but Jane Whorwood was generally held to be ‘well-languaged’, ‘tall’ and ‘well-fashioned’ – even if she did have pock marks on her face. She had strong, even intimate Royalist connections: her father had been Surveyor of the Stables to King James, and her step-father, James Maxwell, was one of the Grooms of the Bedchamber to Charles I. In 1634 Jane had married Brome Whorwood, eldest son of Sir Thomas Whorwood of Holton in Oxfordshire, and had given birth to a son (also red-headed, according to Anthony à Wood) the next year.4
In 1647, when King Charles I was held at Holdenby in Northamptonshire by orders of the English Parliament, Jane Whorwood, ‘bold’ as well as handsome, visited him in order to convey funds which had probably originated with her step-father. She was seized and searched, but released; later a letter in cipher was found behind the hangings where she had stood in the King’s chamber.5
From Holdenby, the King was conveyed to Hampton Court, having been transferred into the power of the English Army from that of Parliament. Here again Jane Whorwood visited him, bringing money. She also took an enthusiastic interest in the possibility of the King’s escape from the Army’s ‘protection’, consulting the celebrated astrologer William Lilly as to his best destination. From Lilly came the suggestion of Essex, where he was ‘certain he might continue undiscovered’. Unfortunately the King had already fled ‘in the night-time westward’.6 (In view of the disastrous consequences of the King’s choice, Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight, one should not perhaps scoff at the workings of astrology.)
To Carisbrooke too came the faithful Jane Whorwood after more consultations with Lilly. Here the King found himself far more securely incarcerated under the control of the Puritan Colonel Hammond; at the same time the need for liberty in order to resume the royal juggling act between Army, Parliament and Scots was yet more urgent. Neither Jane Whorwood – nor anyone else – secured the King’s escape; but Jane kept up a barrage of attempts, including an effort to get him secretly on to a ship ‘to waft him to Holland’. On the advice of Lilly, she purchased aqua fortis, or nitric acid, to weaken the bars on the royal windows, so that they might be pulled from their sockets. Most of that was spilt on the way to the Isle of Wight; but at least Jane got as far as the King’s stool-room with a file also procured by the astrologer. Throughout the autumn of 1648 Jane Whorwood conveyed messages to and from the King at Carisbrooke and according to Lilly, also advised him of the most favourable astrological hour to receive the Scottish Commissioners. ‘I cannot be more confident of any’, wrote Charles I. Since Colonel Hammond was warned of the intentions of this ‘well-languaged’ gentlewoman, it must have been her sex which protected her and allowed her the immunity of these frequent – if in the end unavailing – journeys.7
The disadvantage of Jane’s sex lay in the fact that sooner or later she was accused of being the King’s mistress. There is no evidence to support such a suggestion, which in any case would have been quite outside the King’s character: Charles I was blamelessly uxorious. That however was the penalty Jane Whorwood paid for being an active helper to her sovereign – and at the same time a woman. Afterwards Anthony à Wood innocently increased the rumours by stating the King had bestowed a casket of ‘precious jewels’ upon Jane Whorwood – in fact they went to Lady Wheeler, the King’s laundress. What was true was that Jane Whorwood ran forward to greet the King as he went to his execution8 – but then that was in her ‘bold’ and loyal nature.
The romantic efforts of Jane Whorwood achieved in the end little. The partnership of Anne Murray, later Lady Halkett, and her lover Colonel Bampfylde, achieved in one respect much. For in 1648 this couple secured the rescue of James Duke of York from Parliamentary captivity in London. The what-might-have-beens of history are notoriously beguiling; all that can be
said with certainty about the incident is that Charles I was extremely anxious his second son should not remain in Parliament’s grip as a potential pawn. Beyond that one can only speculate what might have happened if James, next in line to the throne after the Prince of Wales, had lingered in London, a possible titular king in place of his father and brother.
When we last heard of Anne Murray, she had just been slighted by her reluctant lover Thomas Howard, and pined in consequence for some (Protestant) convent to which she could flee (see p. 177). This was in 1644. Thereafter matters still did not mend for portionless Anne, since she fell victim to the charms of the dashing Colonel Bampfylde, a man who was certainly a Royalist agent, and later probably a double-agent as well.
The two-facedness of Colonel Bampfylde extended to his emotional life: a married man, he pretended that his wife was ‘dead and buried’ in order to overpower the scrupulous Anne. Wartime conditions made that kind of deception easier. Besides, the inventive Colonel gave as a reason for keeping this ‘death’ secret the fact that his wife’s fortune would otherwise be sequestered by Parliament. It seems all too likely that the Colonel did overpower Anne’s moral objections to his sexual advances by this stratagem. The truth was eventually discovered – the wife still lived – and Anne, telling the tale in her memoirs, without exactly admitting to her seduction, does react with the utter horror and mortification of one who has sacrificed her principles for a fantasy.9
In 1648 all this pain lay ahead. Anne had begun assisting Colonel Bampfylde in his operations since either early this year or late the preceding one. When Charles I indicated to Bampfylde his extreme anxiety that the fourteen-year-old James should be spirited away from St James’s Palace, it was to Anne that Bampfylde turned for a vital part in the plan.10 The choice was approved in advance by Charles I, for Anne’s mother had been governess to James’s sister, the Princess Elizabeth, and her brother William Murray was in attendance on the King himself. It was also assumed that Anne as a young woman, like Jane Whorwood, would enjoy a kind of freedom of action certainly not granted to a known loyalist such as the Colonel.
So to Anne was entrusted the task of securing a suit of women’s clothes in which the young Duke might make his escape. First she got the Colonel to take a ribbon with him to St James’s Palace in order to mark ‘the bigness of the Duke’s waist’ and ‘his length’. Armed with this, Anne went to her tailor and inquired how much mohair would be needed to make a petticoat and waistcoat for ‘a young gentlewoman’ with these measurements.
There was a long silence. Then the tailor replied that he had made ‘many gowns and suits but he had never made any to such a person in his life’. Privately Anne thought that the tailor was certainly right. However, his actual meaning was to do with the strange measurements which confronted him: ‘he had never seen any woman of so low a stature have so big a waist’. Fortunately the tailor was more baffled than suspicious; he forthwith made a garment of mixed light and dark mohair, with a scarlet under-petticoat.
Now it was up to the young Duke. James, with some perspicacity, instituted a series of games of hide-and-seek in St James’s Palace, so that his guardians should become accustomed to his absences. He also secured the keys to the gardens by a trick and had his pet dog locked up lest it should follow him. In this manner he managed to take advantage of his ‘hiding’ during a game to reach the Privy Garden and so the outside, where Colonel Bampfylde awaited him with the first stage of his disguise: a cloak and a periwig. They travelled first by coach and then by water from Westminster Bridge.
Anne’s turn came next. With her faithful maid Miriam she was to await the arrival of the Colonel and his protégé at the house of a surgeon named Low near the next bridge down river from London Bridge. The Colonel’s instructions were to remain till ten o’clock at night; after that, if he did not come that meant the plot had been discovered, and the women must save themselves as quickly as possible. As it was, ten o’clock came and went without the Colonel’s arrival. But still Anne refused to flee.
Her confidence was rewarded. After a while ‘a great noise’ was heard; Anne imagined that the soldiers were coming to take her. In fact the first sight which met her eyes was the person of the young Duke himself, in those days, as the Grande Mademoiselle of France assures us, ‘extremely good-looking and well made’ (the saturnine looks of the future Charles II were considered much less appealing).11
‘Quickly, quickly, dress me,’ called the boy. So Anne did as the Duke commanded, finding him ‘very pretty’ in his woman’s clothes. She also provided James with some food, including a Woodstreet cake, which she had procured because she knew he loved them. So the Duke, now outwardly a young lady if a somewhat oddly shaped one, departed for Gravesend in a barge ‘with four oars’. And Anne and Miriam set off in a coach, helter-skelter, for the safety of her brother’s home. At that moment all was confident action. The disillusionment concerning the Colonel’s marital duplicity lay ahead.
If women were not passive, true it is that they suffered in the period of the wars (and so of course did the men). There was the most obvious suffering of all caused by the loss of the loved ones, bringing with it that grief which is the handmaiden of wars throughout history. Margaret Eure (for all her meek words a lady of some spirit, as her choice of the Catholic William Eure for her second husband had indicated – see p. 113) certainly found no ‘good end’ in the war. The ‘lucky bullet’, which her brother-in-law Sir Edmund Verney had once angrily hoped would free the headstrong young woman from the ‘misfortune’ of her second marriage to a Papist, found its mark. Colonel William Eure was killed in 1644. Margaret’s romantic love for him had never faded: far from being relieved, she described herself as having suffered ‘the greatest misfortune that could ever happen to me in this world … the Death of the gallantest man that ever I knew in my Life’.12
Grief struck equally at both sexes, but women were more likely to experience those pangs of divided loyalty peculiar to civil wars, brought about by marrying from one political allegiance into another. Thus Mary Rich, daughter-in-law of the Puritan Admiral of the Fleet, the Earl of Warwick, was also the sister-in-law of the Royalist Commander Lord Goring. She was alone at the Rich seat in Essex, Leighs Priory, when Goring arrived to help himself to the Warwick armaments stored in the house. Goring, blithely believing that Mary would favour her own family rather than that of her husband, sent a message to say that he would first take dinner with her, and then commandeer the arms. Mary did serve dinner – but thereafter did her level best to save the store from Royalist depredation.13
The agonies of a Royalist mother whose son joined the side of Parliament are affectingly recorded in the letters of Susan Countess of Denbigh.14 ‘Su’ Denbigh was the sister of the magnificent Duke of Buckingham, favourite in turn of James and Charles I; she had thus been raised in intimate contact with the court, with kings and for that matter queens – she was now a lady-in-waiting to Henrietta Maria, and when the French Queen left for Holland to raise money and troops, Su Denbigh went with her. A friend and patron of the poet Crashaw, it was to Lady Denbigh that Crashaw recommended the Catholic Communion in the lines:
What Heaven-entreated heart is this,
Stands trembling at the gate of bliss?15
And she did subsequently convert to the Catholic Church.
William Earl of Denbigh, who had been Master of the Robes to James I, was equally a staunch Royalist. He was over sixty but he stood forth for the King at Edgehill; to the pain and humiliation of the mother her eldest son Basil Lord Feilding appeared on the opposite side of the battlefield for Parliament.
Clearly Basil Lord Feilding had the gift of inspiring affection (remember the adoration of his third wife, exclaiming ‘Dear! how thy Betty loves thee!’– see p. 65). For Lady Denbigh loved while she agonized. ‘I suffer [more] for the ways you take …’ she wrote ‘than ever I did to bring you into this world.’ And again: ‘Let my pen beg that which, if I were with you, I would do upon my knees
with tears.’ Or: ‘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 [Charles I], the master of your poor afflicted mother, banished from the sight of you I do so dearly love.’
The Earl of Denbigh was severely wounded in the head by ‘swords and poll-axes’ at Birmingham, under Prince Rupert, in 1643; Lord Feilding visited him under a flag of truce – but by the time he arrived, his father was dead. Now let Lord Feilding give her ‘the comfort of that son I do so dearly love’, wrote Lady Denbigh from Holland from the depths of her grief. ‘Leave those that murdered your father,’ she pleaded, ‘for what can it be called but so? … there was no mercy to his grey hairs but wounds and shots, a horror to me to think of.’ Before, her son had been merely in error; now his adherence to Parliament was ‘hideous and monstrous’. Nevertheless Basil Lord Feilding remained true to Parliament; and Susan Countess of Denbigh remained true to the service of the Stuarts. She died in exile in Paris in 1652 without having seen her beloved son again.
Then there were the ordeals of the women who found themselves in the mindless path of the war. If divided loyalties were the painful prerogative of those somewhere near the political centre of things, it was aggravated distress which threatened those lower down the social scale. One Alice Stonier of Leek in Staffordshire was one member of this dejected flotsam, bobbing about between armies, countries and peoples – a lucky one as it turned out, since the righteous justices and churchwardens of Staffordshire eventually came to her rescue. Alice Stonier had been taken over to Ireland by her husband, an unsuccessful drover; there they had been robbed, their house burned, themselves driven out and stripped naked except for a ragged woollen cloak by the somewhat inhospitable native Irish population. The Stoniers slept in the fields at night till they reached Dublin; at which point Thomas was ‘pressed’ (conscripted) to be a soldier, and almost immediately killed. Because Alice and her five children represented Protestant victims of Irish Catholic aggression (a popular English concept at the time) the Stonier family were shipped back to Staffordshire, where Alice was granted 8d a week and her three eldest children were placed ‘in good service’.16
The Weaker Vessel: Women's Lot in Seventeenth-Century England Page 26
