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

by Diane Purkiss

  Elizabeth had undergone a personal experience which suggested that God was providentially at work in her life. She and her father had a very narrow escape from drowning in the Thames on 6 July 1641 when the royal barge caught against one of the piers of London Bridge and capsized. One woman was drowned, a Mrs Anna Kirke, and the others escaped only with difficulty, ‘being also cast away in the Thames were miraculously preserved’. Sometimes a near-death experience makes its survivors reflect on what is truly important, and somehow this piece of ill-luck turned good fortune went along with stubborn commitment to family loyalties and personal relations.

  The possibility that Basil might become involved in a shooting war against the king, facing the prospect of firing on his own sovereign, horrified both Elizabeth and Susan, who still believed that it might be possible to change her son’s mind. She reminded him that affairs were reaching crisis point: ‘I cannot refrain from writing to you and withal to beg of you to have a care of yourself and of your honour, and as you have ever professed to me and all your friends that you would not be against the person of the king, and now it is plainly declared what is intended to him and his royal authority, so now is the time to make yourself and me happy by letting all the world see who have been deluded all this time by them that pretend to be … [ illegible] … of the commonwealth.’ She also gives us a helpful notion of what the queen’s circle were saying about the growing band of their declared opponents: ‘It is now seen what their aim is’, she wrote dramatically, probably referring to the impeachment of Laud and the possible risk to the queen. ‘I am informed the bishops will be inquisitioned at the beginning of the next week for their votes in the house, therefore I would entreat you to absent yourself at this time, that you may make not the last error worse than the first, to the perpetual grief of the heart of your poor mother.’

  Understandably, perhaps, Basil stopped answering his mother’s letters, but this hurt her still more. Susan wrote: ‘I fear I am forgot of you, or else I believe I should have heard from you in all this time which is no small grief to me.’ She was forlorn in other respects, too. ‘I have lost all my goods,’ she wrote sadly, ‘which is and hath been both to me and all that belongs to me a sorrow beyond expression and I do not find this place agrees so well with me and the perpetual fear I am in of hearing worse and worse news of my poor majesty makes me abound with sorrow … You may be sure the great God of heaven will not let the just to suffer long and for your part I know more than I did when I saw you last, they do not trust you, take my word. Dear Son, Have a care of my poor little Su [Basil’s daughter, called after his mother] and send for her sometimes. I shall never fail to give you the best counsel I can, and I do believe that you will find that your mother has dealt more really with you than any other, and I am sure has suffered more than any other. I hope you will never take arms against the King, for that would be too heavy a burden for me to bear.’ But in just a few short weeks, as summer turned to crisp autumn, Basil was to do just that.

  This is a long story, but it is Susan’s story. Basil’s side has not survived, so we cannot guess what considerations made him a Parliamentarian. It may have been because of the long years he spent in Venice, the most admired republic in Europe, though whilst there he had been sent away for having ‘monarchical’ sympathies. Or – as for so many – it may have been a matter of religion. He had been travelling with a godly chaplain, John Reynolds, in the 1620s, which might imply adherence to a more godly way of thinking than that of his mother. At first he became a moderate, like the Earl of Essex, but later he was passionate and radical, siding with the army in its later struggles with Parliament. It is striking that in families where father and son were divided, the father was most often Royalist and the son for Parliament (though not in every case). For the young, dismay at Charles’s innovations in the role of monarchy was not overborne by a sense of personal loyalty and the need to uphold hierarchy, as it was for their fathers. The young man with a father yet living was always especially enmeshed in the drawbacks of hierarchy. Some may have felt, too, that one father was quite enough. Basil’s father William was a dullard who owed his position entirely to Susan’s power and influence, something that may have made it hard for his son to bear his authority.

  A final factor is that Basil had more on his mind than politics in 1641. His wife died on 1 April that year, and just three months later he married Elizabeth Bourchier, daughter of the Earl of Bath. Elizabeth certainly loved him. While he was absent on campaign, she wrote him a letter signed with ‘a hundred thousand thousand kisses’. Perhaps with such blazing affection at his side, Basil felt he could do without a loving mother’s approval.

  These stories could be repeated endlessly, ramified, nuanced, by the many other accounts of the moment of decision that survive. If we know less than we might like about how the literate chose and defined sides, we know less still about the ordinary man and woman of early modern England. A few exceptional people did leave accounts of themselves, but mostly when we do have records of the views of those below the rank of Chaucer’s perfect gentlemanly knight, what remains is a fragment; something overheard by a neighbour in an alehouse or at a village well, and reported to the authorities, or an incautious remark in church. What we can glean from these snatches of overheard conversation is that craftsmen and tradesmen, their wives and daughters discussed the affairs of the nation as earnestly as gentlemen. Sometimes, though, we hear from ordinary men and women because they incautiously voiced their political views aloud and thus had them repeated in court. John Troutbeck expressed the feeling of many when he said that ‘the king was half French, half German, and that he could live as well without a king as with a king’. He added that if the king did not keep his oath and the laws that he might be deposed. This is a sophisticated argument for a rural tradesman, and one can imagine that John expressed it as part of a heated debate. Such debates must have gone on in every alehouse, every hall, every parlour. Mary Giles of Holborn was charged with having declared her intention to kill the king of England, as did Henry Sutton the same year, 1642. Thomas Aldberry, a gunsmith from East Smithfield, said early in 1643 that ‘there is no king’ and announced that he would therefore acknowledge no king. Thomas Creed responded rudely to the king’s flight from London, calling it ‘very great infamy and depravement’. Ansell Powlten said that the king had not a foot of land but that which he must win by his sword, a statement which was repeated by others; it meant that the monarch was not part of the nation, but stood outside it. Roger Moore said that if the king demanded that a man turn papist then that man should ‘rise up against him and kill him’.

  People could also express themselves through petitions to the king, or to Parliament, and hundreds of these flowed in from every county demanding that Laud’s reforms be scrapped. John Waterton, a parishioner in Anna Trapnel’s always rebellious parish of Stepney, remarked darkly that ‘there were more souls damned [by the new prayer book] than died of the plague’, and he offered to fight anyone who disagreed. Conversely, some fiddlers were arrested in June 1642 for singing ‘a scurrilous song against the Parliament’. John Scullard, a London labourer, exclaimed ‘a pox confound the Parliament’ in October 1642, while Edward Jeffery threatened to cut the throats of MPs. The men of Parliament, said a vintner named Nicholas Browne, were nothing but Robin Hoods and Little Jacks; these appellations were not intended to be complimentary, but to tar Parliament as rebels and outlaws.

  Sometimes, too, partisans themselves tried to explain why others chose the sides they did, but their accounts are not always reliable. Take Richard Baxter, chaplain, Protestant but no independent, writing many years after the war to defend dissenters against the then-draconian laws being passed against them. For him to be Parliamentarian is to be virtuous:

  And abundance of the ignorant sort of the country, who were Civil, did flock in to the Parliament, and filled up their armies afterwards, merely because they heard men swear for the common Prayer and Bishops, but heard others pra
y that were against them; and because they heard the King’s soldiers with horrid oaths abuse the name of God, and saw them live in Debauchery, and the Parliament’s soldiers flock to sermons, and talking of religion, and praying and singing psalms together on their Guards. And all the sober men that I was acquainted with, who were against the Parliament, were wont to say, the king hath the better cause, but the Parliament hath the better men.

  and also to be oppressed:

  If a man did but pray in his family, or were but heard repeat a sermon, or sing a psalm, they presently cried out, Rebels, roundheads, and all their money and goods that were portable proved guilty, how innocent soever they were themselves … Thousands had no mind to meddle with the wars, but greatly desired to live peaceably at home, when the rage of Soldiers and Drunkards would not suffer them.

  This is plainly special pleading on behalf of dissenters, since by the time Baxter was writing, his side had lost the peace and was perpetually on the defensive. Nevertheless, Baxter is describing a world increasingly divided from itself, and hence a world of fear.

  Not everyone made choices. The corporation of Coventry strove at first to remain neutral, terrified of alienating either side. There were those who changed sides quickly, under pressure, when one group won out in their locality. When Coventry eventually became a stronghold of the godly, some of those who had been neutral hastily became zealous. In similar fashion, Exeter was initially divided between an eager godly party who supported Parliament and a loyal party led by the Earl of Bath. When Bath fled, hounded because of his Catholicism, the loyal opposition collapsed, and Exeter became a Parliamentarian stronghold. Some people even waited till one or other army was in their area before making up their minds. Some unhappily hoped that they could simply stay out of it and wait for it to blow over. This group included ordinary people, in North Devon, for instance, where only a few could be induced to fight for the king even by very diligent recruitment. So as the shooting war began, the nation did divide, but not evenly or predictably or seamlessly.

  VIII Bright-Harnessed Angels: Edgehill

  Edgehill is a ridge, on the border between Oxfordshire and Warwickshire, three hundred feet high above the plain, three miles long. In 1642 it was bare apart from a clump of trees. The king came to it because he was moving towards London. Parliament’s forces were dispersed around various garrisons – Worcester, Coventry, Warwick Castle. Essex, their commander, felt defensive. And there was an underlying reluctance to attack the king and his forces. It was still unimaginable, attacking the king. Meanwhile, as the October nights drew in and the cold sharpened, the villages began to experience the long-drawn pains of armies camped or quartered in them; eating their food, wrecking their houses. There were few tents, and fewer supplies.

  The Earl of Essex finally lumbered out of Worcester on 19 October 1642. Poor Essex was known far and wide among the Royalists as an impotent cuckold. His wife had annulled her marriage to him on grounds of non-consummation, a subject of many ribald jokes among Royalists. Despite this handicap, he was one of the very few truly great nobles to have sided with Parliament, so he had seemed the obvious choice to lead Parliament’s armies. He was a prize to them, proof that they were not the ragtag of tapsters and shopmen that the Royalists said they were. He was also, it would emerge, only a moderately competent commander.

  He was opposed by quite a different figure, one who would exemplify the word ‘Cavalier’: the very young, dashing, and exceedingly potent Prince Rupert, Charles’s nephew. Of course, Charles himself was in command of the Royalist armies, but Rupert commanded the cavalry – mostly, when the older men could be persuaded to listen to his ideas. He was the child of war, and had plenty of experience in the Thirty Years War, which had unthroned his father and turned his mother into the Winter Queen. As summer chilled into autumn, he was eager for the fray.

  Now, in October, Essex had no idea where the king and his army were, and they were equally ignorant of his whereabouts. Unused to war, the heavy cavalry clung to the army, instead of carrying out reconnaissance. So when the Royalists reached Edgecote, they had no idea that the Parliamentarians were nearby: they had reached the little town of Kineton after dark. As Rupert’s quarter-masters rode into the village of Wormleighton, they met some Parliament-men, who were also searching for somewhere to spend the night. Rupert took them prisoner and sensibly sent out scouts, who reported that the whole army was nearby.

  Typically bold, Rupert wanted to attack immediately, at midnight, but Charles was reluctant, issuing orders for a concentration. With characteristic impatience, Rupert and his men arrived at the meeting-point at Edgehill by dawn. Hours later, the main body of the cavalry arrived, at around ten, and two hours later still, the foot, so that at noon everyone except the rearguard was standing on the ridge, looking down on Kineton, where they could see Essex’s army, which had noticed the Royalists at around 8 a.m. and begun collecting itself. In the centre were the foot brigades, supported by cavalry, while on the left were more cavalry, interspersed with musketeers.

  Among Essex’s troops on the Parliamentarian side were men who would become household names during the war, but who now stood anonymous among their fellows. There were a young captain named Henry Ireton, a cornet called Edward Whalley, and John Okey, and there was John Lilburne, the future Leveller, whose valour would earn him a cavalry troop to command – all future radicals of diverse stripe. There were fifteen men on the field that day whose fate it was to sign the warrant for the death of a king. Among the Royalists were two future kings, Charles II and James II, and the physician William Harvey, said by some to have been in charge of the princes, the man who discovered the circulation of the blood: with admirable detachment, he spent some of the battle reading a book under a hedge until a bullet grazed the ground near him. There too was Thomas Salusbury and the Welsh levies he had raised at the king’s command. Opposite Basil Feilding in his place in Essex’s forces was his father, William Feilding, Earl of Denbigh, a volunteer in the King’s Horse. Despite Susan’s pleading, Basil had stuck firmly to Parliament. Now it was to come to bloodshed, though luckily the two Feildings were not actually driven to cross swords. Opposite John Cary, Viscount Rochford stood his father, Henry Cary, Earl of Dover. Doubtless many members of less prominent families were also to find themselves opposed by those of their own blood. Among the king’s forces was Henry Lilburne, brother of the radical John Lilburne who stood for Parliament: another divided family.

  Meanwhile Rupert was quarrelling with other Royalist commanders. He was trying to get them to deploy in the Swedish manner, which he had learnt fighting under Gustavus Adolphus. The king backed him gamely, and this so offended one of the commanders, Robert Bertie, Earl Lindsey, that he posted himself at the head of his men, directly opposite Essex, hoping to engage him personally. For Lindsey, as for many other Royalists, the war was apt to be seen as a personal quest for honour. He responded to a menace to his image by trying to restore it by a feat of frantic derring-do. This would not be the last time that such considerations swayed Royalist leaders. Meanwhile Rupert commanded the right and the centre was taken by the foot troops. On the left wing were more cavalry.

  No one really knew what they were doing. The strict sonata forms of battle on which interesting and subtle arpeggios and variations could be played had not yet been set. The orchestrated armies had come together, but were not used to playing in concert. Some were used to playing with different performers and conductors. Others were picking up their instruments for the first time, and some could not read the music of war at all. Nor was it clear who was in charge.

  The result, predictably, was not only chaos, but tentativeness. Everyone in command was following a few simple rules. The battle lines were drawn up; therefore there had to be a bombardment. The Royalists had a good general of artillery, but not many guns. The Parliamentarian gunners were very lucky; there was an unexpected ricochet effect. But on the whole the opening artillery duel taught both sides the relative impotence
of the heavy weapons they had lugged so far over thick mud. The guns were weak, misfires were common, and neither side managed to do more than make a lot of smoke.

  Dragoons were sent to clear the Parliamentarian musketeers from the wing, and then Rupert ordered his cavalry to advance. Down the hill they trotted. As they moved forward, they went faster, cantering, galloping. Stoically, the Parliamentarian horse waited, stock-still. They should have been on the move, but they did not know it. They were raw, so raw that they committed the classic error of firing while the Royalists were still out of range. Because no Civil War weapons were repeat-firing, this kind of waste happened often. But no one knew that yet, and the Parliament-men were so shaken and uncertain of what to do that they began to run. Rupert’s troops rode right after them, attacking the fleeing men, cutting at them with their heavy sabres. Sir John Byron’s men shot after the fleeing Parliamentarians, too. It was the same on the left, where the Royalist charge swept Feilding’s men aside, and other Royalist troops soon joined in the pursuit, leaving the field. A few Royalist commanders kept their heads and ordered their men back to the battle. But most had been expecting to sweep the reprobate enemy away in minutes, and they had just done so. The lack of control is manifest in the wounding of a woman named Agnes Potter, who later died of her injuries.

  The Royalist foot were led forward by Sir Jacob Astley, who had begun the advance with a passionate and commonsensical prayer: ‘Oh Lord,’ he begged, ‘thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget thee, do not thou forget me.’ Then he shouted ‘March on, boys’, and the foot moved forward, slow and heavy. The Parliamentarian foot had seen their cavalry run. Other, bolder men rushed into the gap, just as the ten thousand Royalists crashed into the front line. And now it came to push of pike, that deadly rugby scrum in which men armed with long and savage spears tried to force each other onto their points, an ancient kind of warfare that stretched out bloody hands to the spears of Macedon and Greece. With characteristic self-insight, the nine-year-old Prince James observed intelligently that the result confounded expectations. ‘The foot being engaged in such warm and close service,’ he wrote later, ‘it were reasonable to imagine that one side should run and be disordered, but it happened otherwise, for each as if by mutual consent retired some few paces, and they stuck down their colours, continuing to fire at one another even till night; a thing so very extraordinary, that nothing less than so many witnesses as were there present, can make it credible, nor can any other reason be given for it, but the natural courage of Englishmen, which prompted them to maintain their ground, though the rawness and inexperience of both parties had not furnished them with skill to make the best use of their advantages. ’Tis observed of all nations that the English stick closest to their officers, and ’tis hardly seen that our common soldiers will turn their backs, if they who commanded them do not first show them the bad example, or leave them unofficered by being killed themselves upon the place’, he added, showing that he had spent his time at Oxford talking with some old soldiers.