The commissioners of array mustered the trained bands in Hereford, and removed Robert Harley from his position of command. When Robert’s name was called ‘a great many cried out and wished you were there so that they might tear you to pieces’. But others were more loyal; half of Robert’s band defaulted during the Hereford muster.
There was more drama in the parish church at Leominster when Wallop Brabazon, one of the king’s most zealous and eager commissioners, tried to force a visiting rector to read aloud one of the king’s pamphlets from the pulpit. The rector in question, from nearby Bitterly in Shropshire, refused diplomatically, pointing out that only the local vicar was enjoined to read it, but Brabazon’s men began calling him ‘Roundhead’ and threatening him with their cudgels. Order was restored with an effort. Incidents like this helped Brilliana to feel more alarmed and isolated than ever; she worried that the same Royalists might try to force Stanley Gower to read the same pamphlet in the local church.
By now it was clear that there were two sides in Herefordshire, the godly who felt themselves under attack, and the Royalists, who were vastly in the majority. Brilliana Harley and her family were cast as godly not only by their own choices, but by the perceptions of their neighbours. They could never have been anything else.
Not all gentlemen with strong religious views sided with Parliament, however, as this Tale of Three Gentlemen shows. The first is Cornish gentleman Bevil Grenville, a member of one of Cornwall’s greatest gentry families, who was also a brave, intelligent and rather romantic man. He was descended from a celebrated man of action: he was the grandson of Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge, the man who in 1595 had fought on tirelessly alone against an entire Spanish invasion fleet for fifteen full hours. Richard was a potent symbol of English rebuttal of Catholic invasions. But his descendant was not only a warrior, but also a man who said he had devoted so much time to what he called ‘the sweet delights’ of poetry and history while at Oxford that he had never learnt to manage an estate. His letters to his wife are touching in their devotion:
My dearest, I am exceeding glad to hear from you, but do desire you, not to be so passionate for my absence, I vow you cannot more desire, to have me at home, than I do desire to be there, & as soon as I can dispatch my business I will instantly come away … I hope you will not have the child so soon as you fear. I will be as fast as I can, send down those provisions.
Wherever he was physically, Bevil’s mind was on his home and estate:
I have left no order with any body, for the moorstone windows … Make all the haste you can, to thresh out your corn, for fear it be spoiled, & observe how many bushels it is. Let Charles the joiner make a board for the parler [parlour] as soon as you can, as plain and cheap as possible, he can make, only 2 or 3 deal boards fitted together, and tressels to stand on, & so long as to reach from the window to the little door, but not to hinder the going in and out.
When he heard his wife was sick, he wrote in even more heartfelt terms:
My broken lines express the fracture that these tidings do make in my heart and sinews. Yet they have not so far deprived me, but I can resolve this, that if you cannot send me better news by this bearer … then I will be with you by Gods help before I sleep.
On hearing she was better, Bevil reverted to household planning: Turkey work stools, damask, diaper tablecloths, the children’s shoes, feathers for a bed, keeping the pigs out of the plant nursery and the orchard. He filled his letters with this woven fabric of a shared household, with the joys of shopping, and said far less about his lack of enthusiasm for the Laudian changes in religion. But he warned his son, ‘now you are sent abroad into the forest of this world, where so many wild beasts wait for the devouring of all youths, I mean the depraving of their manners’. The little world they made was to be ripped apart by the coming conflict.
It took Bevil almost no time to declare for the king. And yet Bevil Grenville was not the likeliest choice for a Royalist stalwart and war hero. He had been a crucial ally of MP Sir John Eliot in his fights against Charles’s favourite the Duke of Buckingham and against the king’s methods of revenue-raising. Eliot was a fellow-Cornishman and a friend, and the old saying has it that a Grenville was never found wanting in loyalty. Like many of Charles’s fiercest opponents, Eliot was fiercely anti-Catholic, demanding that laws against them be severely enforced in the 1620s. Eliot was eventually imprisoned for his refusal to pay the Forced Loan in 1627, played a major role in the 1628 Parliament, and was one of those responsible for the Petition of Right. As a result of his activities, he was again arrested and imprisoned in 1630.
Bevil blamed Charles for the problems his friend suffered. Indignation conquered caution, and he wrote furiously in 1628 that ‘the King hath lately sent [Eliot] to the tower, for some words spoken in the Parl[ia]m[en]t. But we are all resolved to have him out again, or will proceed in no business.’ But Grenville’s enthusiasm for opposition waned when it became apparent that Eliot might die in prison after his second arrest. His loyalty now led him to urge his friend to compromise and get out of gaol: ‘I cannot but out of the fullness of my grief be very Passionate at your long suffering’, he wrote, with the old indignation. But he also commented that ‘more of the honest knot are fetched away’ which he says ‘drives me into wonder and amazement’.
But then he grows defensive. ‘No man’, he declares, ‘hath with more boldness declared his resolution in this particular than myself, which nor fire nor torture can divert me from, while in my own heart I am satisfied that it belongs to the duty of an honest Englishman so to do.’ Having shown he is no traitor, Bevil proceeds in a separate, undated letter to try to persuade his friend to live rather than die for the cause: ‘for your country’s sake, your childrens’ sake, your friends’ sake . . . I say I beseech you be not nice, but pursue your liberty if it may be had on honourable terms. I will not desire you to abandon a good cause, but if a little bending may prevent a breaking yield a little unto it’, he urged, adding that this would after all enable Eliot to serve his country later. It was all to no avail. Eliot had developed a lung disease, and he died in prison in early 1632.
Interestingly, Bevil’s letters to Eliot do not mention religion as an issue. But when writing to another friend, the future Parliamentarian general Sir William Waller, Bevil showed an interest in the providential unfolding of history not much removed from that expressed by Robert Harley: ‘I wonder nothing at what the Divine justice doth threaten the iniquity of the present times with, but I rather wonder (all things considered) that it hath not sooner happened’, he wrote gloomily. The man who wrote this letter was not at the time a likely Royalist.
But Bevil was to change, and change radically. As well as his friend Eliot, his father had also died. Sir Bernard Grenville had been a much more conservative thinker than his son, and while Bevil was befriending Eliot and refusing to pay the Forced Loan, Sir Bernard had been obliged to try to collect it. His father was also a Buckingham supporter. This gap between father and son foreshadowed the more dramatic fissures that were to split whole families during the war itself. However, on his father’s deathbed in 1635 they were reconciled. This reconciliation seemed to precipitate Bevil into the ardent Royalism that characterized the rest of his career. Determined to join the campaign against the Scots in 1638, he wrote:
I cannot contain myself within my doors when the King of England’s Standard waves in the field upon so just occasion, the cause being such as must make all those that die in it little inferior to Martyrs. And for mine own part I desire to acquire an honest name or an honourable grave. I never loved my life or ease so much as to shun such an occasion which if I should I were unworthy of the profession I have held, or to succeed those ancestors of mine, who have so many of them in several ages sacrificed their lives for their country.
Then when he served in the Long Parliament, he eloquently and vehemently opposed Strafford’s attainder, just as decisively as he had backed Eliot in 1628. He wrote to his fellow-Corni
sh MP, Alexander Carew: ‘Pray Sir, when it comes to be put to the vote, let it never be said that any member of our county should have a hand in this fatal business.’ Carew replied back, dryly, that ‘If I were sure to be the next man that should suffer upon the same scaffold with the same axe, I would give my consent to the passing of it’. Bevil remained adamant.
With sentiments like this, it is not surprising that Bevil Grenville, the king’s own choice, plunged into the job of commissioner ‘for the peace’ or (more bluntly) recruiter for the king’s army. At a public meeting in Launceston, on 5 August 1642, the sheriff read out the King’s Proclamation against the Cornish militia. This call to muster was a traditional proceeding whenever the king required an army. And yet recruitment was slow; even eager, committed Bevil Grenville could only bring 180 men to a muster meeting on 17 August. So a truce was agreed with the militia from 18 August for 15 days. Everyone was groping for what to do. But then four days later the king raised his standard at Nottingham, the brief pause was over, and the splitting into sides continued. When future Royalist general Ralph Hopton arrived on 25 September, he tipped the balance in favour of the king with a piece of dash worthy of D’Artagnan. There was a local peace treaty, made in August, but it was shattered when Ralph Hopton burst in, fleeing with his horse from the Somerset disaster. Hopton tactfully presented himself for trial for breaking the peace; the royalists acquitted him and indicted their opponents for the same offence. Richard Vyvian stood on the steps of the Town Hall in Truro and demanded that the mayor call out the trained bands for the king. The mayor refused. Vyvian appealed to the crowd which had quickly gathered. ‘What unlawful assemblies were gathered in many parts of the country to the danger of their lives, their wives and their children.’ His words had some effect. On 5 October, the trained bands of Truro were sent out for the king.
The majority of the Cornish greater gentry declared for the king, but while some, like Bevil Grenville, were eager, others were dragged along reluctantly. Grenville wrote, ‘for my part I am impatient (as all my honest friends also are) that we did not march presently, to fetch those traitors out of their nest at Launceston, or fire them in it. But some of our fainter brethren here prevailed so far with the sherriff, as there is a conference agreed on this day between 6 of a side, to see if they can compass matters.’
Oddly, he was as motivated by religion as the Harleys, and just as much a Puritan. He was so strict with his troops that he is reported to have ‘wished that his army were all of them as good as his Cause’. He ‘disciplined them to piety and strictness’, wrote an early biographer, ‘[and] there were fewer oaths among them than in any army in England’. Like Hopton himself, Bevil was a Calvinist. Bevil had been active against the Scots, however, which might point to a notion of ‘king first, God second’. He was also a Cornishman, and the Cornish declared almost en masse for the king. The Cornish still spoke a different language in the seventeenth century, and had a long and deep tradition of religious and civil dissatisfaction with decrees from Westminster. They failed to identify with the notion of Englishness that was central to the Parliamentarian cause. In October 1642 the Cornish ejected the supporters of Parliament from the county, out of dislike for their ardent Protestantism; this was promptly denounced by Parliamentarians as a rerun of the popish Western Risings of 1549, and in a way it was, for the Cornish had loathed the vehemently Calvinist Edwardian prayer book as a foreign imposition.
A particularly zealous iconoclast, a man named William Body, had been murdered by the parishioners of St Keverne on 5 April 1548, though the ringleaders were executed promptly by the gentry of eastern Cornwall. In June 1549, when the new and vehemently Protestant prayer book came into use, the West Country congregations forced their priests to revert to the old Latin service, and they rose behind the banner of the Five Wounds, which asked for the restoration of the old Mass, all the icons and the communion service once or twice a year in one kind only. At Stratton, the parishioners took from hiding the images they had carefully kept, and displayed them again; they were removed once more when the rebellion ended. They were led in part by Robert Welsh, a priest born in Cornwall, but who had a parish in the Exeter suburbs. The West Country’s loyalty to the old religion continued. Devon and Cornwall provided only one martyr for the Marian fires.
It is a long historical stretch from 1549 to 1642, almost from grandfather to grandson, but it may not be a coincidence that the places up in arms against the very Protestant prayer book were also among those that took up arms first, and most willingly, for the king. By contrast, towns that leapt to be Protestant in 1558, including Coventry, Colchester, Ipswich, Leicester – were Parliamentarian. It wasn’t quite as simple as this; as with any rule, exceptions can be found. But it might be that the revolts of 1549 lingered – in Cornwall, at least – as a story, a memory of how false religion could be opposed in arms.
Others in Cornwall were more doubtful, however. Unlike Bevil Grenville, Francis Godolphin was a reluctant belligerent. He spent most of the war working for the king in Oxford or Scilly, and entertained the Prince of Wales on St Mary’s in March and April 1646, fleeing with him to Jersey on 16 April. On the surface he seems a pattern of steady loyalty, but his letters breathe doubt. ‘I suppose every man ought in this distraction to be provided as well as he can to defend himself and the cause his conscience directs him to defend’, he wrote tepidly. He referred often to negotiations. In 1646 he wrote, bitterly, ‘how grossly we are all led like sheep to the slaughter … All the kings offers or demands are answered by saying the trust reposed in us by the country will not suffer us to admit of such conditions.’ Still others supported Parliament, but like Sir William Courtney may never have taken up arms on its behalf: ‘out of your wisdom and care of the public good to end these troubles by a treaty and not by force, for by a treaty you may preserve the Commons from ruin the great men and their estates to them and their posterity’, he wrote. He dreaded social disorder, ‘for I have seen the disposition of men that have arms and strength that they may times make themselves master of their officers and sometimes officers suffer the soldiers to be their masters’. By February 1643, he was gloomily predicting famine, murder and pestilence if a peace were not reached soon.
So it came about that Bevil Grenville declared for the king out of honour and local identity, both of which motivated him more strongly than religion, in which his views paralleled those of the Harleys. It wasn’t simply a Holy War, and it didn’t seem like one to everyone, not even to everyone holy.
Where a gentleman lived was crucial in determining allegiance and thinking. Sir Thomas Salusbury was a Welsh gentleman and an enthusiastic poet who eventually raised a regiment for the king. He left a letter in which we can see the deliberation process in action, the kinds of issues a man might consider before committing himself.
In Wales, and in Cornwall, strong national identity was marked by language difference. Most Welsh still spoke Welsh, and although the prayer book had been translated into Welsh, very godly reformers hadn’t really penetrated Wales. One historian calls the Civil War ‘the war of five peoples’ – English, Scots, Irish, Welsh and Cornish – and argues that each saw the war differently. But one could also call this war a war of two million people, each with his or her own point of view, a point of view which might be shaped by national and regional identity or religious conviction or social and familial tradition or, simply, personality, luck and experience.
In a letter to his sister Lady Ursula Lloyd, Salusbury outlined the way in which he had come to decide to fight for the Royalist cause. He began by explaining that he had rushed impulsively to York to join the king, ‘for that I feared lest discourse with friends of a contrary opinion might have prevailed against my desired undertakings grounded upon so much conscience and reason’. He had to commit himself quickly before someone talked him out of it. Like Brilliana Harley and Nehemiah Wallington, he thought about the coming conflict in Biblical terms, but he came to a different conclusion: ‘for mine o
wn part only, and that with Joshuah’s resolution, though all Israel should go aside, yet I and my household will serve the Lord, which I cannot do truly unless I serve his anointed also’. He consulted his Bible carefully to try to decide what was truly right: ‘Fear God and the King and meddle not with those that are given to change, saith Solomon [Proverbs, chapter 24] Fear God & honour the King saith St. Peter in his 1st Epistle, 2nd chapt. 17 verse. Of the same mind was St. Paul and our Saviour himself commands give unto Caesar the things that are Caesars and unto God those things which belong unto God.’
Thomas was sure of what he said, and this bred an equal certainty that his opponents were wrong: ‘Both Testaments are full of positive precepts to this purpose, howsoever the filthy dreamers of these times that defile the flesh, despise dominion, and speak evil dignities are willing to misunderstand and being unlearned and unstable, wrest them as they do other scriptures to their own destruction’, he wrote darkly. He probably meant the godly. Despite choosing the opposite side to Brilliana, Thomas also saw himself as isolated because of it: ‘I have told you what my conscience leads me to, and how far it hath carried me, and if all the men of the earth were of another opinion in this, I am resolved to live and die.’
Historians have tended to associate Royalists with emotion – loyalty, devotion – and Parliamentarians with reason. But Thomas Salusbury claimed that good sound reason led him to choose to side with the king, and to make that choice in July, a little earlier than most: ‘The arguments my reason suggest unto me are grounded upon the diverse inconveniences already grown and the like daily more to increase … the multitude of schisms crowded … already into the Church, give us too just a cause to fear.’ While a man like Nehemiah Wallington might fear papists as a threat to the True Faith, Salusbury dreaded the disunity he felt was sure to follow godliness. Like his opponents, too, Salusbury saw connections between the way the Church was heading and the fate of the polity, writing: ‘nor is it to be hoped that ever the cracked peace of this kingdom may be soldered or pieced together if the regal power be rent and divided into so many pieces’. Like William Shakespeare the generation before, Salusbury feared the mob, writing anxiously that ‘in one man’s breast there can be no faction; in two there may, but in a multitude it is scarce possible but there must as long as men continue to be of several opinions which certainly will not be otherwise in this world.’
The English Civil War: A People’s History (Text Only) Page 20